TAC Protocol stages small recovery after third scare in four months

TAC Protocol’s token rose off its recent all-time low by roughly 53%, following an attack two days earlier that forced validators to halt the chain. The attacker gained access through a gap and emptied a single account before the network was stopped.

The team has attributed the flaw to a shared vulnerability in the Cosmos EVM precompile layer rather than the chain’s own code. 

What the attacker actually reached

The break in was noticed and flagged on August 22 via the protocol’s X account, where the chain announced that it was investigating an exploited gap on its Cosmos-based EVM side and was planning to temporarily halt the chain following the validators’ decision. 

Two days later, the team disclosed that the attacker had drained a single account before the network halted all transactions at block 24,671,475.

According to TAC, the damage was contained, and only $TAC (the native token) was stolen before the chain was halted. Noticeably, the halt happened within minutes of the exploit being spotted, hinting at growth caused by earlier attacks, which hit bridged user assets rather than just the native token itself.

TAC says the defect isn’t its own infrastructure

TAC placed the bug outside its own codebase, and the team believes that the vulnerability actually sat in the Cosmos EVM precompile layer (a shared module) rather than anything belonging to TAC, sharing that several chains also run the same code.

This means that the stakes extend beyond TAC holders and also affect anyone building on the Cosmos EVM chains. Since the flaw is not just in the TAC code, but a shared code, any fix or disclosure timeline could affect not just TAC, but also other projects built on Cosmos EVM chains. 

Price increase is a bounce from all-time lows 

The token’s recovery looks a lot stronger if you consider the percentages instead of the money. Before the attack, CoinMarketCap logged TAC’s all-time low at $0.001129 as of August 22, and since then, the token has recovered about 53% of that plunge. Over the past 24 hours, it swung between $0.001626 and $0.001894.

Regardless of the bounce back, the position of the token hasn’t changed that much. TAC’s June 30 peak of $0.06688 now looks like a distant achievement, leaving the token down 97.4% from its all-time record high. 

At the time of writing, though, its market cap stands at roughly $8.3 million, with $2.46 million in 24-hour trading volume and a CoinMarketCap rank of #1007. Circulating supply sits at around 4.8 billion tokens.

$TAC has had a rough few months, with the platform enduring its third major scare in four months. Back in May, an attacker stole about $2.8 million from the TON side of its cross-chain bridge, thus affecting USDT, BLUM, and tsTON balances. 

The TAC team reclassified the incident as white-hat activity after recovering about 90% of the funds (the exploiter kept 10% as a bounty), and reopened bridge transfers between TON and TAC on June 10.

The calm didn’t last long before the token dropped by around 82% to around $0.0056 on July 7 with no explanation. By August, right before the exploit, TAC was already weak and suffering, which is why a 53% bounce off the floor still leaves the token near record lows.

If you're reading this, you’re already ahead. Stay there with our newsletter.