Nearly $2M Stolen in Attacks on Fetch.ai, NuNet and SingularityNET

Fetch.ai's bridge lost 8.7 million FET over a weekend that also saw its two sister projects, NuNet and SingularityNET, mint roughly 2.3 billion more tokens out of thin air. The attacker walked away with about $1.9 million in realised cash and, according to blockchain security firm Peckshield, was still sitting on roughly $16.77 million in unsold tokens by the time the dust settled.

For holders, the second number is what hurts. Prices of the affected tokens collapsed after their supplies were flooded with counterfeit tokens, and the sale of even the genuine FET drained in the first attack knocked FET down 5% on its own.

What changes for you: any token you held in the four affected names, FET, NTX, AGIX, WMTx or CGV, almost certainly trades at a fraction of its pre-attack price, and the projects have not said how, or whether, holders will be made whole.

How the weekend unfolded

Fetch.ai, NuNet and SingularityNET all sit inside the Artificial Superintelligence Alliance, a loose federation of "decentralised AI" projects that share branding and, in places, infrastructure. The attacker appears to have known that. Two of the three were hit "almost simultaneously", according to Protos, with the SingularityNET bridge exploited hours later. Peckshield's alert later tied all three to the same actor.

The first hit was a straightforward bridge drain. 8.7 million FET left Fetch.ai's bridge, and the attacker sold 523 ETH worth about $1.2 million. That single sale was the lion's share of the realised cash.

The next two hits were a different kind of attack. On NuNet, 400 million NTX were minted out of thin air. On the SingularityNET bridge, 900 million AGIX, 500 million WMTx and 500 million CGV were minted the same way. None of those tokens had to be bought; the attacker simply created them.

Selling them was harder. With most of the supply on each token now made up of freshly minted fakes, prices collapsed and the attacker could only offload a sliver. Subsequent sales of the four remaining minted tokens together returned just 183 ETH, or about $420,000. The 500 million CGV tokens sold for $30 in total because the order books were too thin to absorb any real volume.

A separate $289,575 in USDC was drained from a payroll contract on top of that, bringing the realised take to roughly $1.9 million, the "about $2 million" figure cited in early reporting.

What the attacker is still sitting on

Most of the attacker's stash has not been sold. Peckshield said the exploiter was holding about $16.77 million of crypto, including 198.3 million AGIX worth roughly $14.42 million and 649 ETH worth about $1.67 million. Bitquery noted that the nominal value of the tokens at the time they were minted was several times higher than what the attacker actually realised. In other words: the attacker printed tokens that, on paper, were worth far more, then watched most of that paper value evaporate as the markets priced in the flood.

How the attacker gained access remains unclear

The attack vector is not stated in the public reporting. What Bitquery does say is that the majority of the signing keys involved have not been changed. That points strongly at a private-key compromise somewhere in the alliance's shared infrastructure rather than a clever smart-contract bug, but the three projects have not, to our reading, named a cause.

There is also a number we could not square. Peckshield's alert cites 260 million AGIX and 53.838 million WMTx minted on Ethereum from the SingularityNET exploit, while the Protos summary gives the SingularityNET totals as 900 million AGIX and 500 million WMTx. The two figures do not reconcile on the pages we read, and neither source links to a primary on-chain record we could verify.

Recoverability is the open question most readers will care about. None of the three projects has been quoted as saying the funds are, or are not, recoverable.