Manta Network harmed by DDoS attack during token issuance

Its developer team is actively working on resolving congestion issues on Manta Network

January 19, 2024 01:28 pm

Artwork by Crystal Le

Manta Network, a modular ecosystem for zero-knowledge (zk) applications, suffered a distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attack during the issuance of the Manta (MANTA) token to its community.

DDoS attacks are malicious attempts to disrupt server traffic, often through overwhelming target infrastructure, leading to slower processing times.

“Yesterday, we saw network disruption caused by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that happened at 9:30 am UTC, the same time as our token generation event (TGE) where we saw over 135 [million] requests hit our remote procedure call (RPC) nodes,” Kenny Li, core contributor and co-founder of Manta, told Blockworks.

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According to a post by Manta Network on X, this attack has led to longer transaction times and increased gas prices on the network. The team indicated that it is actively working on resolving this issue.

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“Given that we were hit by over 135 [million] transactions in a short period of time on our RPC nodes, we have increased the security round of our DDoS integration. Due to the nature of this type of attack, the congested transactions will be resolved over a period of time,” Li said.

Manta’s Token Generation Event (TGE) saw an initial circulating supply of 251 million MANTA tokens being distributed to advisors and ecosystem and community members. The total supply of MANTA tokens at Genesis will be 1 billion MANTA, with a 2% yearly minting rate.

Initially, after the launch, the price of the MANTA token was trading at roughly $2.70, according to information available on CoinGecko. Following the news of the attack, the token price dropped by 22%, trading at $2.08.

At the time of writing, Manta Network’s MANTA token is trading at $2.27 with a market cap of $570 million.

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