Nearly $80 million in new USR tokens were minted illicitly following a security breach at Resolv, the company that manages the USR stablecoin. Over the weekend, an attacker exploited a vulnerability in Resolv's infrastructure by accessing a crucial private key associated with the token minting process.
Resolv Labs announced the incident on social media, affirming their commitment to recover the lost assets and hold the perpetrator accountable. However, attempts to reclaim the funds may be challenging, as reports indicate that about $25 million has already been converted into ether, complicating recovery efforts due to its decentralized nature.
Despite comparisons to the collapse of the UST stablecoin in 2022, experts from Chainalysis identified that the failure stemmed from centralized infrastructure rather than issues with financial engineering or smart contracts. The attack involved unauthorized access to Resolv's cloud systems, specifically targeting their AWS Key Management Service, where the critical signing key was stored.
Following the incident, the value of USR has dropped significantly, trading below $0.25 as of Monday morning, reflecting the fallout from the minting of unbacked tokens.