SOL price dips as Solana exploit impacts over 7,000 wallets

Solana (SOL/USD) price dropped on Wednesday morning as an exploit on the Layer 1 network saw a staggering 7,767 wallets impacted.

As the attack, which was first flagged on Tuesday, spilled into Wednesday, the price of Solana remained wedged in red amid a green spike across the market. SOL traded to lows of $38.06 to see the token down more than 3%, and the only token in the top ten by market cap in the red.

Are you looking for fast-news, hot-tips and market analysis?

Sign-up for the Invezz newsletter, today.

At the time of writing (07:05 ET), SOL/USD was priced around $39.40, down from a 24-hour high of $42.28 based on an aggregate price of the major exchanges collated on CoinGecko.

Solana vulnerability hits over 7k wallets

The Solana blockchain was reportedly exploited on Tuesday evening, with the draining of thousands of hot wallets.

According to Web3 on-security security platform Anchain, at least $5 million in stolen funds had moved between two wallets. More than 4.2 million SPL tokens (ecosystem tokens) had so far been siphoned out, the firm noted.

While much is still to be established about the hack, early reports suggest the targeted wallets are Phantom and Slope.

Solana Labs co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko tweeted on Wednesday that the attack appeared to be a “supply chain attack,” with this theory based on the fact that “multiple plausible wallets that only received sol and had no interactions beyond receiving have been affected.” 

According to him, this seemed to have impacted iOS and Android wallet users.

The Solana team has asked users to move their assets to hardware wallets as they work with blockchain security providers to identify the extent of the vulnerability.

The exploit on Solana came within hours of another attack that had drained nearly $200 million from Nomad bridge.