GriffinAI - Rekt
Less than 24 hours after launching on Binance Alpha, Griffin AI watched their carefully planned tokenomics explode into hyperinflationary chaos.
Someone with the right connections convinced LayerZero that a fake Ethereum contract deserved the same trust as the real one, then proceeded to mint 5 billion unauthorized $GAIN tokens like a rogue central banker.
The attacker dumped just 2.8% of their freshly printed fortune for a clean $3 million payday, leaving the remaining 97.2% as a digital sword of Damocles hanging over what remained of $GAIN's market cap.
Griffin AI's founder stepped up with a mea culpa that's rare in DeFi - full responsibility, no excuses, complete ownership of the security failure that happened "on his watch."
But taking blame doesn't resurrect dead tokenomics or explain how someone gained the power to rewrite cross-chain infrastructure rules without anyone noticing.
When your bridge becomes someone else's money printer, who's really controlling the flow of value across chains?
GoPlus Security spotted the bleeding first on September 24th:
"The Web3 AI project Griffin AI, which just launched on Binance Alpha, has been hit by malicious minting that issued an additional 5 billion tokens for dumping (with $GAIN's maximum supply being 1 billion tokens), causing the $GAIN price to plummet over 90%."
GoPlus followed up with posting a screenshot of the malicious minting that pushed GAIN's supply 5x beyond its intended 1 billion token cap.
Their warning was crystal clear: users should avoid interacting with the project to prevent losses while the attack was still unfolding.
CertiK watched it happen live: "The attacker initialized a false LayerZero Peer on Ethereum, then bridged 5B fake tokens to mint 5B $GAIN on BSC."
PeckShield followed the money - 147.5M $GAIN dumped for 2,955 BNB, bridged to Ethereum, swapped for 720 ETH, with 700 ETH hitting Tornado Cash.
Blockscope mapped the laundering operation across chains while the funds were still warm.
Security firms moved faster than Griffin AI's own damage control team - by the time the project acknowledged the exploit, blockchain forensics had already mapped the entire money trail.
What does it say about protocol security when external watchdogs sound the alarm before the protocol even knows it's bleeding?
Damage Admission Theater
Griffin AI's first public admission came 22 minutes after GoPlus sounded the alarm - a masterclass in corporate understatement.
"We are investigating the issue and will make a detailed post as soon as we have more information," they posted shortly after the exploit, treating a $3 million heist like a minor technical glitch.
No acknowledgment of the scale, no warning to users, just bureaucratic placeholder text while their token bled out in real-time.
Founder Oliver Feldmeier finally stepped up over an hour later with the technical breakdown: an unauthorized LayerZero peer setup had enabled the attacker to deploy a fake Ethereum contract ($TTTTT at 0x7a8caf) and use it to mint 5 billion GAIN on BNB Chain.
The mea culpa came the following day - a rare display of executive accountability in DeFi.
"This is an incredibly difficult day, and I want to start by offering my deepest, most sincere apologies to the entire Griffin AI community," Feldmeier wrote, taking full responsibility for the security incident that happened "on my watch."
He promised a complete migration to a new, fully audited token with restored balances based on pre-hack snapshots - essentially admitting their original tokenomics were beyond repair.
The real question isn't how LayerZero got fooled - it's how someone got the keys to fool it. Admin privileges don't just leak into the wrong hands by accident. Someone either got phished, got paid, or got careless.
But ownership of failure doesn't explain how someone gained the power to rewrite cross-chain infrastructure rules without anyone noticing until the damage was done.
Why does taking responsibility feel more like damage control when the fundamental questions remain unanswered?
The Cross-Chain Con
LayerZero's peer system turned into Griffin AI's personal money printer.
Someone with admin access ran the classic DeFi con - make the bridge believe fake tokens are real tokens.
Contract 0x7a8caf became the decoy while the real GAIN endpoint sat ignored at 0xccdbb9.
Fake Contract (Decoy):
0x7a8CAffeb11047E90Affc9F7527103b0334572E6
Real GAIN Endpoint Contract:
0xccdbb9c8e43f50407c58f81407a16549e2a475dd
Deploy fake $TTTTT token on Ethereum. Swap it in as the LayerZero peer. Watch the bridge treat phantom deposits like legitimate cross-chain transfers.
But here's how they actually pulled it off: Blocksec Phalcon revealed the attacker managed to get an Admin address to invoke the setPeer function - maybe via phishing.
This action designated a malicious contract address as a trusted peer, enabling arbitrary token minting through the cross-chain bridge.
Compromised Admin Address (On BSC):
0x54A978238984d581EdD3a9359dDA9BE53A930a7e
Malicious Contract Peer Address (On Ethereum):
0xba159054636e69080ae7c756319e5c85498efeb0
The setPeer transaction on BSC shows exactly when the attacker gained their minting privileges.
No collateral backing required. No verification. Just minting privileges for days.
Griffin AI's own infrastructure couldn't tell the difference between real cross-chain messages and complete fiction, happily minting 5 billion GAIN tokens while the attacker counted their phantom Ethereum "deposits."
5 billion GAIN tokens minted:
0xa85b18bdbd32fbe5468de38032f7f2717faaad663d33991b2c71ce0b3892e866
This wasn't an isolated incident, as highlighted by Blocksec Phalcon: "Yet another attack targeting Griffin AI similar to the Seedifyfund incident: fraudulent cross-chain messages from the source chain were accepted and executed on the destination chain."
GoPlus Security specifically flagged the exploit as similar to "a prior attack on the Yala project," where fake LayerZero peers were also used to bypass cross-chain security checks.
LayerZero's peer trust system keeps getting owned the same way - Seedify, Yala, now Griffin AI, all falling for the same fake peer con.
What the blockchain recorded was elegant in its simplicity: someone convinced a bridge that the fake was real, then cashed out before anyone noticed the difference.
When cross-chain infrastructure can't distinguish between authentic and counterfeit peers, what's stopping the next attacker from running the same playbook?
Following the Money Trail
The blockchain doesn't lie about the execution.
The attacker minted 5 billion GAIN tokens, bloating total supply from 1 billion to 5.2985 billion.
Attacker address: 0xf3d17326130f90c1900bc0b69323c4c7e2d58db2
Here's what makes it beautiful: they dumped just 147.5 million tokens.
That's 2.8% of their money printer output, but enough to obliterate GAIN's price by 90% and walk away with 2,955 BNB (~$3 million).
The other 4.85 billion tokens? Still sitting in the attacker’s wallet.
Attacker’s Wallet on Arkham (still unlabeled): 0xF3d17326130F90c1900bc0B69323C4C7E2d58Db2
PancakeSwap's shallow liquidity turned a modest dump into total devastation.
The stolen BNB got bridged to Ethereum via deBridge while Griffin AI was still figuring out what hit them.
deBridge Transaction 1:
0xcfaf94a7d7e4b56bf0698f2cba88e46c2cc1c584a897e65f1a63ac88de290045
deBridge Transaction 2:
0x31661ffc5311cd13bf59cb3a5122198c2ce4d4420d221bedfba634fdda49fc58
deBridge Transaction 3:
0x22afbc0ecb066e7247a68919082d9bc1b3f59cb02582ee113f2d570cb446ea57
deBridge Transaction 4:
0x9be63ee5b0175328403ea0b9ecd55b676e528ee43beba065e83b0d25bc1fae2c
deBridge Transaction 5:
0x3a175487668f521e4aedf86aa2d96f059b50f08520c31c164fb16265fe2f8e0b
deBridge Transaction 6:
0x16fbdad32ad3f875918604a8f27edd1a22e0e23c6845a6d5b4e0a41741f2d5f2
Some funds made it to Tornado Cash for laundering.
According to EmberCN, the 2,955 BNB were converted through deBridge into roughly 720 ETH and distributed into the following six wallets.
5 of the wallets laundered 100 ETH each and the other laundered 200 ETH.
Wallets used for laundering:
0x1afc80d0E15cBCBfAAB9aD5520b4ab843Dfd648D
0xD4d83C2BC58B97d6458a7AE7d5b417c5422DC04C
0xB31BDDb3d1c2b45E5c5fE149Aa4c8304e9D1916C
0xa6654f227EcCF2f84476d2d51434081613F8Baba 0x107E83EBE677DDec253C440127F23310720177c2
This wallet moved 200 ETH and is still sitting on 20 ETH:
0xf1755A2b7d0e418E9BAB4F81AD674fa39fA7F23D
The attacker didn't need to cash out everything to destroy everything.
How do you spin a story where 2.8% of fake tokens obliterated 90% of your market cap?
When the Music Stops
The dance floor emptied fast once Griffin AI realized the DJ had left the building.
Within an hour of detecting the exploit, they pulled the emergency brake on everything that mattered - official liquidity pools vanished from BNB Chain like ghosts at sunrise.
"Please DO NOT interact with any LPs that may be created by the attacker.
They are not official and pose a risk," Griffin AI warned, essentially admitting they'd lost control of their own token ecosystem.
Daily trading volume surged 126% to $96 million as panic selling dominated DEXs.
Griffin AI painted the shutdown in corporate poetry: "we’re coordinating closely with exchanges and security partners" while users watched their portfolios bleed in real-time.
Griffin AI called out to all exchanges to pause GAIN trading, with KuCoin and MEXC responding so far by suspending deposits, withdrawals, and trading.
Griffin AI also announced the end of its airdrop campaigns following the exploit, though the completed Binance Alpha airdrop remained unaffected, leaving users staring at frozen expansion plans while the token burned around them.
The music had stopped, but the dancers were still falling - and some were still trying to trade with counterfeit tokens in pools that shouldn't exist.
When your emergency response involves asking nicely for help, who's really conducting this orchestra of chaos?
Griffin AI's $3 million vanishing act reads like a DeFi déjà vu fever dream.
Admin keys turned into weapons. Cross-chain bridges became counterfeiting machines.
Another day, another reminder that your biggest threat might be checking email while holding the master keys.
Hours before everything went to hell, traders were riding GAIN's "price-discovery tear" with $109.8 million in launch volume, hyping the "high-momentum move" toward $0.20 resistance.
By the next morning, those same momentum chasers were staring at a 90% crater where their portfolios used to be.
The script feels painfully familiar: UXLink's multisig betrayal cost users $41 million just days ago, proving that whether it's LayerZero peers or delegateCall functions, administrative access keeps morphing into exit ramps.
Even more fitting - the Griffin AI exploiter later minted trillions fake UXLink tokens in three separate transactions using a counterfeit contract created on September 23rd.
Because apparently when you're running a counterfeiting operation, why not counterfeit the other counterfeiters too.
Griffin AI's founder took rare ownership of the failure, but accountability doesn't resurrect dead tokenomics or explain how cross-chain trust mechanisms become counterfeiting operations overnight.
The 4.85 billion phantom tokens still sitting in the attacker's wallet serve as a constant reminder that this story isn't over - just paused.
Maybe the real exploit was the friends we trusted with admin keys along the way.
When your biggest security risk sits in the boardroom instead of the codebase, what exactly are we auditing?
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