Decentralized battle game Illuvium still highly anticipated despite attack

On Dec. 31, Illuvium’s official Discord channel got phished when attackers directed users to a website claiming to be Illuvium’s NFT platform, causing approximately $150,000 in losses.

One week later, the Illuvium team discovered a vulnerability in Illuvium’s staking contracts, which has allowed attackers to mint an unlimited amount of $sILV.

After these attacks, Illuvium’s trading volume dropped significantly, taking it from #7 in the volume ranking to #32.

Will Illuvium, whose liquidity mining and locked collateral features made it one of the hottest gaming projects (without any gameplay even live yet), be able to regain its trading volume?

And, will the attacks affect perceptions of the project as it prepares to launch a beta of its game?

There’s not even a game yet. Why is Illuvium so popular?

High-profile Team

Illuvium is a decentralized NFT collection and RPG combat game built on Ethereum. The game is set on a mysterious alien world that can be explored and players can capture creatures called Illuvials.

Illuvium’s founding team includes Kieran and Aaron Warwick, brothers of Synthetix founder Kain Warwick. They have more than 7 years of experience in cryptocurrency projects, and have undertaken extensive research to make this game a success.

Innovative Gameplay

Illuvium includes many highly anticipated elements that have yet to be executed successfully in the play-to-earn space. For example:

• Adventuring: Players can explore the mysterious alien world, build teams, and capture Illuvials.
• Battle arenas: Illuvials or players can fight each other in automatic battles to level up their skills, and players can also fight against each other, configuring their weapons and armor to increase their chances of winning. Other players can place bets on the matches.

Reward Tokens with Appreciation Potential

There are two types of tokens in the game: ILV and sILV.

ILV is the native token of Illuvium. sILV is a synthetic ILV token used as in-game currency for capturing Illuvials. sILV cannot be used for inter-player transactions, such as buying or selling Illuvials.

According to Footprint Analytics, ILV’s coin price has been climbing since August 2021, when liquidity mining and other features were opened, peaking at $1,853 on Nov. 30.

However, the delayed launch of the Illuvium public beta prompted a precipitous drop in ILV, which was compounded by the theft of funds by attackers exploiting a vulnerability that dropped the price of ILV to $568, and trading volumes were equally bleak.

Some Challenges for Illuvium

According to Footprint Analytics, Illuvium was in GameFi’s Top 7 games with $1.43 million in trading volume as of Dec. 31, second only to Metaverse Miner.

Illuvium’s team responded to the attack by promptly revealing and patching the vulnerability. sILV casting has been suspended by Illuvium’s team to compensate users who lost money. In addition, various measures were taken to provide security for the protocol. These include:

• A comprehensive review of Discord servers, with identification of inactive users and bad actors to prevent them from sending fraudulent messages.
• Removing webhooks permission for all users except super administrators.
• Enhancing the security of applications, focusing on bug fixes and vulnerabilities, improving workflow and other features.
• Abandoning sILV. The team will mint a new sILV token (tentatively called “sILV V2”) to replace the original sILV V1 token, which will be implemented in the Staking V2 contract.

Summary

Even though Illuvium has not yet gone alive, its well-known team, innovative gameplay, and attractive tokenomics model has attracted attention not only from players but attackers.

Luckily, Illuvium’s team acted quickly to regain trust and fix issues. The attacks have highlighted the importance of providing users with security rather than just performance, something that will be increasingly important as P2E gaming goes mainstream.

Feb. 2022, Vincy — Data Source: Footprint Analytics – Illuvium Dashboard

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