Governance attack on Audius, lost $6M

A hacker tricked the smart contract of the decentralized music platform and finally secured 705 ETH. 

Audius is a music streaming decentralized platform built for all musicians. This platform is just like a music social media platform, which allows creators to post their original music content. Audius is decentralized where 90% of revenue generated on the platform goes to the creators directly. Initially, the platform was deployed on the Ethereum network but now it supports the solana blockchain, to allow the creators to do the activities at the platform at low cost. This platform has support from Katy Perry, The Chainsmokers, Linkin Park’s Mike Shinoda, and other popular celebrities of the music industry. All these popular personalities invested in this project via an investment funding round of Audius.

On 24 July, crypto & blockchain security analytic platform Certik reported that the Audius platform exploited and lost around $6 million worth of Audio tokens. 

Security platform explained:

“The attacker modified the Audius governance contract’s configurations, then proposed and executed a malicious proposal draining 18.5M AUDIO.”

Hacker(s) modified the governance contract system of the platform. Through the modified governance configuration, hacker targeted “execution delay,” “voting period” and “guardian period,” to trick the vote for the malicious proposal and execute it.

In August 2021, the giant short video social media platform TikTok established a partnership with Audius platform to allow the users of Audius to upload their music to TikTok within a matter of clicks.

Price action

At the time of writing this article, the price of the Audio token, Native token of Audius platform, is $0.344 and this price is 4.55% down over the last 24 hours’ trade price. A sudden sharp downfall in the price of Audio tokens can be seen because of the hack attack on the Audius platform.

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