Someone just printed a quadrillion tokens out of thin air. That’s a one followed by fifteen zeros, or roughly 100,000 times the entire legitimate circulating supply of MAPO, the native token of Map Protocol.
The result was about as predictable as you’d expect. MAPO’s price cratered from around $0.003 to approximately $0.0001 within hours on Wednesday, a decline of roughly 96%. The token’s market cap collapsed to below $1 million, effectively vaporizing whatever value holders had been sitting on.
How a bridge became a money printer
The exploit targeted the Butter Network cross-chain bridge, specifically version 3.1 of the Butter Bridge infrastructure. Cross-chain bridges are the connective tissue between different blockchains, allowing tokens to move from one network to another.
The attacker found a way to trick the bridge into believing a massive mint was legitimate. The bridge obliged, creating 1,000,000,000,000,000 MAPO tokens in a single stroke.
