Initia halts chain after MoveVM minting incident

'~$2.7m worth of AUSD, ETH, and USDC' minted and bridged out, per co-founder Zon on X. Initia reposted that post but has not issued its own figure. Researcher Spreek initially estimated ~$2.6M (via The Block).

Root cause: Not yet published. Preliminary statement from co-founder Zon: 'a Day 0 bug related to Initia's MoveVM on CosmosSDK that allowed the exploiter to mint additional tokens on the Initia L1 but does not apply to native INIT tokens.'

Timeline, as sourced: Halted 23 Oct 2026, 3:41:30 PM UTC (per Initia).

Initia announced (opens in a new tab) that as of 3:41:30 PM UTC on 23 October 2026 its L1 and rollups were halted due to a security incident, and that it is working with security teams, validators and exchanges to establish the scope. In a preliminary post (opens in a new tab), co-founder Zon said the issue appears to be a previously unknown bug related to Initia's MoveVM on Cosmos SDK that let the attacker mint additional tokens on the L1, and that it does not apply to native INIT. He said the attacker minted and bridged out about $2.7 million in AUSD, ETH and USDC before the chain was paused. Initia reposted the co-founder's post but has not issued its own figure, and no technical post-mortem has been published.