Qubic halts mainnet after wallet drain empties 1,404 accounts

Qubic, a decentralized AI computing network, paused its mainnet on October 18, 2026, after an attacker drained 1,404 user wallets. The haul came to approximately 2.94 trillion QU tokens, worth approximately $1.3 million at the time. According to Qubic’s developers, the exploit was not a bug in the network’s code. It traced back to weak, predictable wallet seeds created on legacy Apple devices, Safari browsers, and early iOS applications. A 104-minute raid, then a hard stop The attack ran from 23:42 UTC on October 17 to 01:26 UTC on October 18. That is about 1 hour and 44 minutes, enough time to clear out more than a thousand wallets. Validators then stopped the chain at tick 85,371,949. A tick is Qubic’s unit of network progress, roughly comparable to a block on other chains. Halting at that point locked the ledger in place. About 87.1% of the drained QU never left the Qubic network and is now immobilized on-chain, unable to be moved or sold. The remaining 12.9% made it to MEXC. The exchange froze the receiving account within 1 hour on suspicion that it was linked to the attack. Bitget took a separate precaution, suspending all QUBIC deposits and withdrawals while the situation pla...