Polkadot Cross-Chain Bridge Attacked, 1 Billion DOT Maliciously Minted and Dumped

April 13th — Per HyperInsight monitoring (via its Telegram channel: https://t.me/HyperInsight), a whale with address **0x004edcd40360e293e4cf260d2ebdf8c7076c1bb8** opened a 33x leveraged short position on BTC in the past 30 minutes. Key details: - Average entry price: $70,745 - Position size: 200 BTC (~$14.15M) - Current unrealized loss: 10% Earlier this morning, the address closed its prior BTC short position at break-even before immediately re-entering a new short — marking its 5th short trade this month.

On April 13, CertiK monitoring revealed that the Hyperbridge cross-chain gateway contract on Ethereum was exploited in a vulnerability attack. Attackers manipulated the admin permissions of the Polkadot token contract by forging messages, minted 10 billion DOT tokens, and dumped all of them—ultimately netting a modest profit of just around $237,000. The profit was far lower than the minted value due to extremely limited on-chain liquidity: intense selling pressure immediately crashed the price from $1.22 to nearly zero, making most of the minted tokens nearly illiquid. The attack targeted the bridged version of DOT assets on Ethereum, not the Polkadot native chain itself. To date, neither Hyperbridge nor the official Polkadot team has issued a formal response.

Hong Kong police announced on April 13 that a romance scam resulting in losses exceeding HK$2 million was reported in the past week, per the Cyber Security and Technology Crime Bureau’s platform. The scammer first followed a woman in her 50s on Instagram, started chatting via post comments, and quickly built a romantic relationship. They then posed as a “cryptocurrency investment expert” and used “risk-free investment” claims as bait. The victim was initially asked to transfer HK$40,000 as an “account opening fee.” The scammer later lured her to a physical currency exchange shop seven times to swap cash for USDT, which she sent to the scammer’s account via an e-wallet. After receiving the funds, the scammer disappeared and cut all contact. Police warn the public to stay vigilant when making online connections. If someone claims to be an investment expert and requests any transfer, pause and think carefully immediately.

April 13 — Genius, the perpetual DEX trading terminal developed by YZi Labs, announced the addition of a "Refund" feature to its airdrop program in response to widespread community queries about token allocation. Per the official announcement, users may opt to burn all GENIUS airdrop allocations within 48 hours post-TGE (Token Generation Event) to claim a refund of net transaction fees collected by the platform. Genius stresses the refund is tied to net fees (not total fees): the platform has cumulatively refunded over $7 million to its trading community and distributed over $1.3 million in referral rewards—both amounts deducted from the refundable pool. Additionally, the refund only applies to fees collected by Genius directly; fees from third-party protocols (e.g., PancakeSwap) are excluded. The official statement notes users have full discretion to either hold GENIUS or request a refund, and warns any misinformation about "partial refunds" will be addressed immediately.

April 13 — U.S. President Donald Trump took to his personal social media platform again early on April 13 Eastern Time (ET) to announce the U.S. will block ships entering and leaving Iranian ports starting at 10 a.m. ET that day. Following unsuccessful U.S.-Iran negotiations, Trump said on April 12 he didn’t care whether Iran returned to the negotiating table, noting the U.S. would impose a blockade on Iran at 10 a.m. ET on the 13th and expressing disappointment that NATO had not backed the U.S. in the Iran conflict.

April 13 — Per on-chain analyst Yu Jin’s tracking, a suspected BSC Life whale has withdrawn 57.88 million tokens from Binance via 6 addresses over the past 20 hours, worth roughly $9.37 million. Back in late February, the whale also pulled 59 million tokens from Binance through two linked wallets. Currently, it holds ~116.9 million BSC Life tokens on-chain—11.7% of the total supply—valued at ~$21.71 million. Additionally, GMGN data shows the meme coin has surged 6x in nearly two weeks (climbing from $0.037 to $0.22). It now trades at $0.177, with a market cap of ~$177 million and 24-hour trading volume of $12.7 million. [View GMGN data: https://gmgn.ai/bsc/token/i_m4TE56o8_0x924fa68a0fc644485b8df8abfa0a41c2e7744444]