Initia’s blockchain has been halted since 06:18 UTC on Tuesday after an attacker drained bridged assets, and the project’s INIT token has still roughly doubled. Binance’s INIT perpetual contract opened Monday at $0.1200 and traded at $0.2535 at 17:33 UTC on Tuesday, a gain of 111%.
In its latest post on the Initia exploit, the project put the haul at about $3.27 million. This report follows what Initia has published, then what the INIT market did while the chain was down.
Three posts on the Initia exploit, in order
The first came at 19:30 UTC on Monday. Initia said it was investigating an issue with rollup infrastructure, had asked rollups to pause, and had found no impact on user funds.
INIT was already $0.1567 at 19:29 UTC, up from about $0.125 that morning. The post itself barely moved it. The big hour came next, from 20:00 UTC, when Binance’s perpetual contract traded $49 million.
The second post, at 07:07 UTC Tuesday, announced the halt. Transfers out of escrow accounts that hold assets bridged to several rollups had been made with compromised rollup keys, Initia said, and about $605,000 of USDC had left through Noble.
The third, at 16:43 UTC, was the fullest. An attacker had entered through a compromised cloud key on 9 November and reached the hosting platform that rollups on Initia use. Forged withdrawals from five rollups then unlocked assets held on the Initia L1.
Initia said the attacker moved about $3.27 million of assets, and that $2.16 million of it is stuck on the paused chain. The rest was sold on Initia’s own decentralized exchange, then 13,400 TIA, 8,000 USDC.inj and 597,000 Noble USDC went out before outbound rate limits stopped further withdrawals. No INIT was withdrawn, the project said.
How INIT traded through the Initia exploit
Binance’s INIT perpetual traded about $1.04 billion in the 24 hours to 17:00 UTC on Tuesday. All of Sunday brought $7.4 million. Spot trading over the same 24 hours came to $32 million, so futures were about 32 times larger.
Open interest, meaning bets that traders have opened and not yet closed, grew from $5.6 million at 12:00 UTC on Monday to $20.7 million at 15:00 UTC on Tuesday. Funding, the fee that one side of a perpetual pays the other, turned negative the whole way up. It hit Binance’s floor of minus 2% at 16:00 UTC, and the contract now settles it every hour. Negative funding means traders holding short bets pay those holding long ones.
During the Initia exploit, spot also traded above the futures price, by as much as 27% at 14:55 UTC. The spot high was $0.3319 at 14:51 UTC, against $0.2880 on the perpetual. By 17:33 UTC the gap was about 6.5%.
What Initia says happens next
The project intends to restore the backing of every asset hit by the Initia exploit and has not yet published the plan. It is rebuilding the affected infrastructure from scratch in an isolated environment, and expects that to take longer than a routine restart. Recovery of the stolen assets is under way with law enforcement and security partners, the project’s last post said.
Initia said it will share a timeline for the chain’s return once one exists.
Two levels on the chart since the Initia exploit
The first resistance the move cleared was $0.1390, the high of a short spike on Monday at 08:00 UTC. Price took it out at 16:00 UTC Monday and has traded above it since 19:00 UTC that day. Above, the perpetual’s Tuesday high of $0.2880 is the mark to beat. Below, $0.1832 is the low from 12:01 UTC Tuesday, the last point where sellers pushed hard before the 14:00 UTC surge.
CoinGecko counts about 219 million INIT in circulation, worth roughly $59 million at $0.27. Other recent futures-led moves have not held. Janction rose 320% in hours on Sunday and was 51% lower over the 24 hours to Tuesday afternoon.
Until the chain returns from the Initia exploit, the INIT price is trading on contracts, not on a working network.
