The Bittensor Blockchain Incident

The Bittensor blockchain experienced a security breach that resulted in an attack on several user wallets. The incident led to the draining of $8 million worth of the project’s TAO tokens from at least one wallet. Following the attack, the value of TAO tokens dropped by as much as 15%, but there was a slight recovery after the core team implemented measures to prevent further issues.

As a precautionary measure, all transactions on the Bittensor blockchain were completely halted while the team conducted an investigation. The chain was put on “safe mode,” where blocks were being produced, but transactions were not being processed.

Blockchain trackers for the Bittensor network indicated that the most recent transactions and blocks were processed around 23:00 UTC on Tuesday. Independent security researcher @ZachXBT highlighted on his Telegram channel that one user had lost 32,000 TAO tokens in the attack, equivalent to $8 million, and suggested a potential private key leakage as the cause.

The investigation into the attack was ongoing as of Wednesday morning, with efforts to determine the nature and extent of the security breach. Bittensor, known for connecting machine learning models globally, is a significant player in the artificial intelligence-focused cryptocurrency space, boasting a market capitalization of $1.6 billion.