According to analysts at Lookonchain, an exploit in the Hyperbridge gateway contract allowed an attacker to mint one billion DOT tokens on Ethereum and immediately sell them, driving the price to zero. On April 13, the Polkadot team confirmed the incident and halted the protocol’s operation.
The attacker generated DOT and sold the entire amount in a single transaction, receiving around 108 ETH — approximately $0.237M. Transaction data shows that the tokens were minted from the zero address, then routed through several addresses before being sold into a Uniswap v4 liquidity pool.
Network Not Affected
Polkadot released an official statement: the vulnerability originated in the Hyperbridge contract on the Ethereum side. The exploit made it possible to mint unbacked DOT tokens that exist only as a bridged version and are not tied to the actual token supply on the Polkadot network.
The Polkadot team confirmed that the issue is limited to this specific bridge. Other bridges and native DOT remain unaffected. Hyperbridge operations have been suspended, and developers are actively investigating the incident.
The total impact is relatively small by major DeFi hack standards — $0.237M — but the case is significant: the attacker managed to mint a billion tokens while bypassing all minting limits.