Second hack in three weeks costs Initia $3.3M

Less than three weeks after a prior incident, the Initia blockchain was halted again on Tuesday morning.

At least $615,000 in losses resulted from an infrastructure key compromise. Added to the $2.7 million lost in October, the total exceeds the chain's remaining TVL.

The Initia L1 was halted at 06:18 UTC on November 10 in coordination with validators as a protective measure.

We took this step after identifying unauthorized transfers from the escrow accounts on the Initia L1 that hold assets bridged to several rollups. Our investigation so…

— Initia (@initia) November 10, 2026

Initia L1, which names Binance Labs, Delphi Ventures, and HackVC among its backers, describes itself as a "base layer and central liquidity hub for all Interwoven Rollups."

The announcement on the Initia X account on Tuesday morning detailed the chain halt, which came after the discovery of "unauthorized transfers from the escrow accounts on the Initia L1 that hold assets bridged to several rollups."

The post pointed to "compromised rollup infrastructure keys allowing an attacker to fabricate IBC transfers" as the cause. It tallied $615,000 that was moved off-chain. Still, "most" of the assets taken from escrow accounts are still on Initia, the post said, suggesting they may be recoverable through validator coordination.

Second hack in three weeks

Less than three weeks earlier, a script caching bug had allowed an attacker to "artificially [spoof] the MoveVM state, thereby crediting themselves with unbacked WETH, iUSD, and USDC tokens." This was the vulnerability in the prior hack.

That earlier incident caused $2.7 million in losses that were bridged to Ethereum. It also prompted a halt of the Initia chain and its rollups. They were back online by November 2, only to be hacked eight days later.

Across the two hacks, total losses amount to $3.3 million. This is higher than Initia's remaining TVL, which has fallen over 90% from its peak shortly after its launch in May last year.

User reaction to the latest incident was harsh. Calls for the chain to shut down and accusations of an inside job emerged. Meanwhile, the INIT token rose around 60% over the last 24 hours, sparking suspicions of a "crime pump" among frustrated users.