A bug in its smart contract that allows users to double their balance by sending tokens to themselves has led to a crash in Miner's price.

Miner, a novel token minted using the experimental ERC-X standard, crashed over 99% in the past few hours before paring losses. At the time of publication, each Miner token trades at $11.41, down 87% on the day.

As told by developers on Feb. 14, the $10 million sell-off resulted from a glitch in its smart contract that allowed users to double their tokens by simply transferring Miner tokens to themselves. "This issue will be fixed," developers wrote. "Contract will be audited before being redeployed. The saved liquidity (~130 ETH) is currently equal to ASTX LP [Liquidity Provider] and will be used for LP purposes for redeployment."

Yu Xian, co-founder of Singaporean blockchain security firm SlowMist, said in relation to the double-spending glitch: 

"It's a pity that the contract has low-level loopholes. You can double your balance by transferring money to yourself...there are so many standards implemented without reference, the cost of innovation is a bit high, and the losses are not low."

Created by Miner developers, ERC-X is a novel Ethereum token standard that combines features from the ERC-20, ERC-721, and newly invented ERC-404 token standards. In response to the "glitch," the Miner team has asked the individual who first discovered the smart contract glitch to return 30% of bugged funds amounting to $120,000.

$MINER is hacked. Do not interact!https://t.co/9KTwG3ltSs

The root cause is if you transfer to yourself, your balance would be doubled. pic.twitter.com/EnOxoaIaja

— Chaofan Shou (@shoucccc) February 14, 2024

While many new Ethereum token standards have been deployed in recent years, experts have warned of their experimental nature and lack of approval by the Ethereum Foundation itself. One such standard, ERC-404, was invented earlier this year and enables fractional ownership of nonfungible tokens. Pandora, the first token minted using ERC-404, has since surpassed $200 million in market capitalization. 

Source: Cointelegraph.