It wasn’t hacked. Users put funds into a protocol that wasn’t appropriately vetted by its community, and the maintainers that the community trusted with that protocol (as direct controllers of important canister) abused that powered and stole the funds (that’s my read on the info shared above).
You could argue the funds were given to them by the users. I’m nor aware of a regulatory body that has a framework in place that would allow this to be seen any differently.
The lesson?
Don’t use crypto protocols that aren’t decentralised, and/or aren’t open source, and/or don’t have a diligent community inspecting code and canister controller relationships.
Or do, because there aren’t enough exemplary options out there, and accept that you may have to suffer the consequences.
Something the NNS should do in my opinion is consider deregistering the Sonic SNS.
It’s strange that there wasn’t an official statement from Nuance @nicko regarding the SONIC hack… Did the DAO have liquidity? Everything on ICPSWAP has already sold out.
Was there a Sonic developer? A proposal could be made in the NNS to shut down Sonic, or use the treasury to recover the price of the affected tokens… or something similar…
The responsibility to look after the Sonic DAO was the responsibility of the Sonic DAO. If the NNS tried to step in, not only would it be a lot of work for all involved, it’s also completely out of its scope (it can’t step in every time users decide to give away their funds).
Take the relatively simply and easy fix that was applied for TAGGR a long time ago. It completely divided the NNS and it only passed by a hair. All that was about was unbricking a canister that was accidentally bricked (which was easy to verify). That was clear cut. This isn’t. The controller of a canister dipped into the funds they already had control over. How many other protocols do you think are set up this way and exposed to the potential for this behaviour right now?
We would like to inform the community that our team is actively investigating the recent security incident.
During our investigation, we have identified several promising leads related to the attack. We are going ahead with legally.
Our current findings indicate that an unauthorized party gained access to our pool canister and drained funds from several liquidity pools, primarily those created by the Sonic DAO.
As an immediate precaution, we have paused the protocol while we work to secure the system and prevent any further impact. Our team is taking all necessary technical and legal measures as the investigation continues.
We will share additional updates as soon as we have verified information to provide.
For our official announcement, please see our latest post on X:
We understand the frustration and concern, but we don’t believe that’s a constructive solution for the community.
Is shutting down a project really how we should respond when a platform suffers a major security incident? Many protocols across the industry have faced attacks, investigated them, recovered, and came back stronger.
Right now, our priority is to investigate the incident, secure the protocol, and pursue every available avenue to recover the stolen funds. We’ve already identified promising leads and are actively working on them.
We ask the community to give us the time and space to handle this responsibly. Once our investigation is complete, we’ll share a detailed postmortem and the steps we’re taking to prevent anything like this from happening again.
We appreciate everyone’s patience and support during this difficult time.
Looking back at how the team handled the funds…siphoning them off all this time, it’s a total shocker that this would be their final move. Truly, mindblowing. Save yourself the effort of an investigation. Nobody, and I mean nobody, is waiting for you to mark your own homework. End of story. Next!
We did have some liquidity - it was the pool we used since launch. We chose sonic because it was open source, rather than icpswap which wasn’t at the time.
Any idea how many Fran guys we have in ICP?
Fake proposal to get funds out from Dao. And why does Proposer lead to some Fran guy. Most hackers, rugpulls and other junk is the same known people, lets hope its not you. https://nns.ic0.app/proposal/?u=uly3p-iqaaa-aaaaq-aabma-cai&proposal=238