Axion Successfully Relaunches After An Unforeseen Hacking Attempt

In October 2020, when the global economy was still recovering from the after-effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and business lockdown, Axion Network came up with a new breed of cryptocurrency to serve mainstream income investors. The feature that lured thousands of users to it was a stable return rate no other cryptocurrency had offered before. Not to mention, the crypto community welcomed it wholeheartedly and made Axion a huge hit as soon as it hit the market.

Things were going smoothly until November 2, 2020 - the day when Axion Network officially launched AXN. A presale token called HEX2T had been available for several months prior to launch, which had gained over 10,000 holders and raised the market cap to over $100m. At launch, all holders could exchange their HEX2T 1:1 for the newly launched AXN.

During the buildup to the launch, five separate teams, including Hacken and CertiK, were appointed to examine the token's code and ensure a hassle-free deployment. However, a few hours after the launch, the founding team of AXN noticed an unusual drop in AXN's price. Before they could do anything, an unauthorized actor had unloaded 79 billion AXN tokens in the market. This event slashed AXN's market price by 99% and helped him make a whopping 1300 ETH worth $500,000 within a short span.

Axion took control of the situation immediately after this incident and informed all the participants via its official social channels to not indulge in asset trading.

In the hours that followed, Axion Network continued to post many other updates to ensure its users don't panic after this incident.

What Went Wrong for Axion?

The Rock'n'Block team, responsible for ensuring a smooth launch of AXN, was hired by Axion Network's CEO, and an agreement was drawn between both the parties. As ordered by Axion Network, the initial tasks were completed according to the terms of the contract.

Later on, Rock'n'Block insisted on conducting third-party audits in place of an internal audit. Axion brought Certik and Hacken on board for this task. None of these firms found any critical errors in the project and gave it a green signal. On November 2, four software engineers were given the charge of verifying and deploying the contract.

Given how things unfolded right after the deployment, it's clear that one of these engineers substituted Axion contract code for a malicious code. The suspect verified the code on EtherScan a few hours after the deployment, which wasn't possible otherwise for anyone else.

He used the vulnerable code to withdraw 79 billion AXN and released them on the AXN Uniswap exchange immediately. This sudden release of AXN coins in such colossal quantity drained its value to zero, helping the attacker make 1300 ETH worth half a million dollars.

Who's the Attacker?

According to this press release, the alleged attacker is a sub-contractor named Ilya Maximovich Solovyanov, who had been working with Rock'n'Block since the beginning of 2020. He's based in another city and has refused to cooperate with authorities investigating this matter.

The Relaunch

The Axion Network team has taken the matter into its hands and filed a criminal report in the local law enforcement department to recover funds stolen by the attacker. Meanwhile, they requested all the participants to not trade or withdraw AXN until further notice.

CertiK and Hacken, firms responsible for external auditing of contracts, have come forward to offer every possible support to the Axion Team in an attempt to bring things back to normal.

Protecting investors' interest is Axion Network's top priority, and for that, they relaunched AXN on November 11 with better security protocols. All the participants, including those who panic sold their coins after the price crash, were offered new AXN tokens at a 1:1 ratio.

As a participant, you don't have to take any manual action. The tokens allocated to you have already been airdropped to your wallets. If you haven't received your funds yet, wait for a day or two until the airdrop process finishes.

In case you bought AXN after the price crash, you'll be compensated $0.00025 per AXN. To revive things further, Axion Network held a fundraiser and used 20% of the ETH auction fee for injecting liquidity into the system. The effort more than replaced what had been stolen in the attack.

The Road to Recovery

So far, Axion's relaunch has gone well. The revived platform already has 124 billion tokens staked, which reflects the high level of trust the community has in the team. Among those, 760 investors have staked 3.6 billion Axion tokens for the maximum time of 5,555 days, or over 15 years.

That means the Axion network has already cemented its long-term stability, leaving it poised for strong growth. And on November 20th, Axion's weekly token auctions will begin. On that day, more than 13.5 billion tokens will go up for auction, raising over $3 million in rewards for stakers.

The strong early performance of Axion after its relaunch bodes well for investors and the developers. And the developers don't plan to keep all of the spoils for themselves. They've now pledged 1% of each weekly auction's proceeds to the Eden Reforestation Project. That amount will translate into over 300,000 new trees planted after the first auction alone.

As the auction schedule goes into full swing, the Axion community is responding with overwhelmingly positive feedback. In these early days, it appears that Axion's team has accomplished its goal of making investors whole and getting the system back on track. And there's every reason to believe that the good news will continue. So, keep an eye on Axion in the coming weeks and months. It should be a major comeback story worth watching.