The cybersecurity firm Hacken has blamed a private key leak for a major and very damaging token exploit. A bad actor minted and looted $250,000 worth of the ecosystem’s native Hacken Token, also known as HAI. This malicious action caused the digital asset to plummet around ninety-nine percent in value this past Saturday.
The company said the private key was unfortunately compromised during some major “architectural changes” to the firm’s blockchain bridge. These specific changes were being applied precisely to prevent these exact types of security risks from ever happening. Hacken team members have said they have since revoked the compromised minter account from the main token contract.
Hacken’s CEO stated that the biggest damage from the incident has been to the company’s overall reputation.
Hacken’s CEO announced that all tokens on the affected networks that were bought after the hack occurred will not be supported. The company’s primary goal was always to convert the HAI token into a regulated security token representing equity. Hacken said its long-term goal now is to transform HAI into a regulated financial tool merging token utility. All of the legitimate user balances currently remain trackable, and HAI tokens will have an option to swap later.
As a precaution, the company has paused all bridge transactions on the Ethereum and the BNB Chain networks.
This incident is part of a much larger trend of significant cryptocurrency heists that have been occurring recently. A report from the blockchain security firm PeckShield said that hackers stole over $1.6 billion in crypto. This staggering amount was stolen from many different victims during only the first quarter of the year 2025. More recently, the liquid staking protocol Meta Pool suffered a very similar type of token minting exploit on June 18th.
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