Audius got launched back in 2020 as a decentralized music streaming service such as Spotify but with a better handle on privacy and giving more freedom to the creators and musicians.
The platform was an instant hit among the music community because it took away the need to have an intermediary to produce and broadcast your music; plus, you could earn AUDIO tokens, which is the primary cryptocurrency of the platform. But all of that has been rendered useless for a while by a serious hack.
Hacker Positioned Himself as the Sole Guardian of the Governance Contract
Multiple contracts are orchestrated within Audius; some are smart contracts, while others are governance contracts. Hacker played a nasty game by requesting the transfer of about 18 million AUDIO tokens from the common community treasury, which corresponds to about $6 million.
This kind of request needs to be filtered and approved unanimously by the guardians or participants of that specific governance contract, but he showed himself as the sole guardian and executed the request almost instantly. He was able to do that by calling the smart contract function, and he was successful in this attempt.
Audius’s Response
Audius has come forward with a strong response as since then, the smart contract functionality has been resumed, and all the spam addresses have been cast out.
Not only this, but Audius has also paused the issuance of new AUDIO tokens so that the further loss of funds could be prevented. Now the funds present within the community treasury and within the foundation are both extremely safe.
This might not have hit the platform as hard as it seems because the hacker, soon after retrieving the AUDIO tokens worth more than $6 million, took to Uniswap and sold these for $1.08 million, causing a slippage in the price of the AUDIO price.
Luckily one of the investors at Audius has agreed to buy back those lost tokens to prevent the firm from complete selloff additionally, more serious security systems have been put into place to make sure that something like this doesn’t happen ever again.