MANTRA Proposes Recovering 37.96 Million Frozen Tokens From Hacker Address

MANTRA has proposed recovering about 37.96 million frozen tokens from an attacker’s address in a future on-chain software upgrade. According to Foresight News, voting on Governance Proposal No. 40 is open and will end at 12:10 on November 13. The proposal concerns recovering and handling funds stolen in the August 20 security incident. The address was sanctioned at the protocol level in the v8.4.0 upgrade and cannot transfer funds. Any tokens recovered would be added to the OM upgrade incentive allocation. Most of the stolen tokens had been moved to a centralized exchange before the address was sanctioned, so they cannot be recovered through an on-chain upgrade. MANTRA is working with Hong Kong law enforcement and the exchange operator to recover them, but the recoverable amount is unknown. Recovered tokens would continue to replenish the incentive allocation until it reaches the approximately 121 million MANTRA previously removed from it. Recovering the frozen tokens would leave a shortfall of about 82.97 million; any amount recovered beyond that shortfall would be permanently burned. After the final unrecovered amount is determined, the team plans to submit another proposal by June 30, 2027, outlining further measures to mitigate the incident’s impact. In a previous incident review, MANTRA said the attacker exploited a vulnerability in the upstream Cosmos EVM module and transferred about 721 million MANTRA, including about 121 million from a genesis multisignature address linked to an incentive program.