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MAP Protocol’s MAPO token plunged after attackers exploited Butter Bridge V3.1 and minted roughly 1 quadrillion counterfeit tokens, overwhelming the reported legitimate supply and triggering a sharp price collapse.
Map Protocol said the exploit hit Butter Bridge V3.1’s cross-chain minting logic on Ethereum and BNB Chain, rather than Ethereum itself. The counterfeit mint was roughly 4.8 million times larger than the reported legitimate circulating supply of about 208 million MAPO, prompting MAP Protocol to pause Butter Bridge after the incident was detected.
Fake MAPO Sale Drained About $180K in ETH
Early exploit reports said the attacker dumped about 1 billion fake MAPO into the Uniswap ETH/MAPO pool and extracted roughly $180,000 in ETH before the wider market fully reacted. The attacker reportedly retained most of the counterfeit supply after the initial sale. That meant the direct on-chain theft was relatively small compared with the market damage caused by the fake supply shock.
The price impact was severe because the fake supply overwhelmed MAPO’s reported legitimate circulating supply and damaged confidence in the token’s supply integrity. The exploit severely damaged confidence in MAPO, with the token plunging between about 96% and 99% depending on the exchange and timing of the price snapshot.
Hash-Collision Flaw Linked to Butter Bridge Mint
MAP Protocol has not yet published a full postmortem, but early technical analysis points to a flaw in Butter Bridge V3.1’s retry-message verification logic. Some security writeups linked the exploit to an abi.encodePacked hash-collision issue that allowed the attacker to abuse the bridge’s verification path.
The issue was not tied to an ECDSA bypass, key compromise, or parser bug, suggesting the failure came from Butter Bridge’s own message validation process rather than Ethereum or its core signing system.
Butter Bridge Pause Leaves MAPO Supply Trust Test
The MAPO incident adds to concerns around cross-chain bridge security. When a bridge can mint assets across chains, one validation failure can instantly create unbacked supply and severely damage confidence in a token’s market integrity.
For MAP Protocol, the next steps are clear. It needs to isolate the counterfeit supply, restart Butter Bridge safely and convince users and liquidity providers that legitimate MAPO supply can still be trusted.
