Hack Turns $GAIN Into Pain, Griffin AI Token Crashes 84%

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Ah, the sweet smell of a perfectly executed heist! Griffin AI’s native token, $GAIN, was flying high, living the dream-until, well, reality came crashing down. In a mere 24 hours, the token’s price plummeted by an absurd 84%, dropping from $0.16 to an almost laughable $0.017. In one fell swoop, millions of dollars evaporated like a summer breeze. Investor confidence? Gone. Wiped out. Like tears in the rain.

The culprit? A hacker, or perhaps more accurately, a digital Houdini. CertiK, a blockchain security firm, confirmed that the attacker tricked Ethereum into believing a counterfeit LayerZero Peer was legitimate. This deception allowed the hacker to mint a whopping 5 billion fake GAIN tokens. And what did they do with this newfound wealth? They bridged those tokens to Binance Smart Chain (BSC), of course, and sold them for almost $3 million. Money laundering? Oh, don’t worry, that part was neatly handled via Tornado Cash. Classy.

#CertiKInsight 🚨

We have seen an exploit on @Griffin_AI. The attacker initialized a false LayerZero Peer on Ethereum, then bridged 5B fake token it created to mint 5B $GAIN on BSC.

The 5B GAIN tokens were liquidated for ~$3M and bridged back to Ethereum, then deposited into…

– CertiK Alert (@CertiKAlert) September 25, 2025

Once safely nestled on BSC, the hacker sold those tokens for about $3 million, bridged the profits back to Ethereum, and-like a magician-disappeared into the ether. But this wasn’t the end of the story. Oh no, we’ve only just begun! These funds were then funneled through Tornado Cash, a notorious crypto-mixing service-talk about hiding in plain sight.

Lookonchain Tracks Stolen Funds

On-chain analytics platform Lookonchain, ever the diligent detective, tracked the hacker’s every move. Nearly 3,000 BNB (worth around $3 million) was swapped during the exploit, then converted into Ethereum (ETH) and subsequently laundered through Tornado Cash. Some wallets related to this act of digital piracy have even been flagged as suspicious. But will the stolen funds ever be recovered? Who knows. That’s the thing about privacy tools-they’re like the cloak of invisibility for criminals. Nifty, right?

5B $GAIN was abnormally minted, part of which was sold for 2,956 $BNB($3M).

The funds were then bridged to #Ethereum via deBridge, swapped for $ETH, and deposited into #TornadoCash.

Address:
0x107E83EBE677DDec253C440127F23310720177c2
0xB31BDDb3d1c2b45E5c5fE149Aa4c8304e9D1916C…

– Lookonchain (@lookonchain) September 25, 2025

Market Impact and Price Crash

Meanwhile, the market? A chaotic mess of panic-selling and arbitrage trades. The trading volume of $GAIN shot up over 400% in the aftermath of the exploit. Who wouldn’t want a piece of a token that just got absolutely steamrolled?

CoinMarketCap reported a heart-stopping 81.66% drop in the token’s market cap, which now sits at a meager $4.6 million. Ouch. This sharp dive is a clear sign that those 5 billion minted tokens did some serious damage. The market’s trust? Gone. Like a puff of smoke.

The Griffin AI debacle serves as a harsh reminder to both investors and developers: cross-chain bridges and token minting vulnerabilities are not just risky-they’re catastrophic. Millions were lost, trust was shattered, and in crypto, one exploit can erase years of hard work. Talk about a brutal lesson learned the hard way.

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2025-09-25 10:16