Harmony's ONE Token Crashes 37% After Hacker Mints 4 Billion Tokens Out of Thin Air — Here's What Happened

WHY IT MATTERS

Imagine you own shares in a company, and suddenly someone counterfeits billions of new shares and starts selling them. Your shares would instantly become worth much less because the total supply just exploded — that's essentially what happened here. In crypto, 'minting' means creating new tokens. Normally, only the protocol itself can do this under strict rules. But a hacker found a way to bypass those rules and create 4 billion ONE tokens out of nothing, then likely sold them, crashing the price. This is why security audits and decentralization matter so much in crypto — a single vulnerability can wipe out a huge chunk of a token's value overnight.