Acala (aUSD)
CollapsedStablecoin · $aUSD · born 2021 · ✝ 2022
A misconfig minted billions of stablecoins for free.
aUSD was the native stablecoin of Acala, a DeFi hub on Polkadot. In August 2022 a liquidity-pool misconfiguration let attackers mint billions of aUSD for free, crashing the peg before Acala froze the network and burned the erroneously created tokens.
- Peak
- Polkadot DeFi hub
- Cause
- Collapsed
- Year of death
- 2022
☠️ Cause of death
A misconfigured iBTC/aUSD pool allowed unbacked minting of aUSD, flooding supply and breaking the dollar peg; the emergency freeze and burn limited losses but damaged trust.
📓 Lessons left behind
- —A single pool misconfiguration can break an entire stablecoin.
- —Cap and monitor mint authority continuously.
- —Pausing the chain to fix a bug is a trust cost of its own.
🌱 The idea that survived
Mint-rate safeguards
Reinforced supply caps and real-time monitoring on stablecoin minting paths.
#stablecoin#depeg#misconfiguration