Incident Overview
In June 2024, Holograph, an NFT protocol, suffered a $14.4 million hack. A former developer exploited a vulnerability in the smart contracts to mint 1 billion HLG tokens, leading to a significant drop in token value.
In June 2024, Holograph, an NFT protocol based on Omnichain, suffered a $14.4 million hack when a former developer exploited an infinite mint vulnerability in the protocol’s smart contracts to mint 1 billion HLG tokens. The attacker’s address was approved to call the mint function, allowing them to bypass access controls by deploying a malicious smart contract on Mantle. After minting the tokens, they bridged them to the Ethereum network and began dumping them, causing the HLG token value to drop by 80% within nine hours, despite exchanges freezing approximately 200 million of the minted tokens.
Incident Report
Protocol Information
Market Context at Time of Hack
What the Attacker Needed to Succeed
Understanding the prerequisites for this type of attack helps auditors identify protocols that are most at risk and helps developers build better defenses.
What Auditors Should Check
If you're auditing a protocol with similar architecture to Holograph, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (June 2024).
- Verify all logic paths related to Infinite Mint and Dump / Other are guarded by proper access controls and input validation
- Review privileged functions (owner, admin, governance) for potential abuse vectors - centralization risks should be documented and bounded with timelocks or multi-sigs
Master these auditing techniques with hands-on labs and real exploit scenarios in the Smart Contract Hacking course.
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