Maya Protocol exploited for $1.7M as attacker drains 48.87M CACAO tokens

Maya Protocol, a cross-chain liquidity platform, was hit by a sophisticated exploit on August 18 that drained approximately 48.87 million CACAO tokens and 98.82 LINK from shared liquidity pools. The direct theft totaled roughly $1.7 million, but the collateral damage was far worse: CACAO’s price cratered nearly 89%, and the protocol’s total pool value dropped by an estimated $10.9 million. Protocol founder AaluxxMyth confirmed the exploit publicly, while blockchain security firm CertiK flagged the stolen assets. The network has since halted operations to contain further losses, and the team is exploring recovery options including a white-hat bounty offer to the attacker. How the exploit worked This wasn’t a smash-and-grab. The attacker chained together six distinct bugs in Maya Protocol’s logic, executing a single transaction containing 23 messages that manipulated the protocol’s internal accounting systems. Think of it like finding six separate unlocked doors in a building, then walking through all of them in exactly the right sequence to reach the vault. The attack targeted Maya’s shared liquidity infrastructure, which is designed to facilitate swaps across multiple blockchains. ...