Hoskinson Challenges Hackers After Cardano Account Takeover
On December 8, the official X account of the Cardano Foundation was compromised by malicious individuals, leading to the spread of a fake Solana-based token and misleading legal claims. These attackers introduced a fictitious token named ADASOL, which misrepresented Cardano as being redesigned with Solana's speed and innovation in mind.
The attackers managed to draw attention by directing users to trusted sources. They attempted to lend credibility to their token by utilizing the Cardano Foundation's website and a recent podcast episode. However, once users recognized the scam, the value of $ADASOL plummeted by 99%. Initially, this token generated a trading volume of approximately $500,000, but it rapidly lost value.
After the misleading posts about ADASOL were removed, the account issued a deceptive statement claiming that the Cardano Foundation was being sued by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The statement alleged that due to this lawsuit, the foundation would have to reduce its support for the ADA token.
Following these fake posts, Cardano's founder Charles Hoskinson confirmed the attack on the account and quickly announced the situation on his X account. Hoskinson hinted at adding new features aimed at enhancing user security on the social media platform, referencing Elon Musk.
Despite Hoskinson's swift denial of the misleading information, the value of ADA fell by 4.5% as a result of these events, dropping to $1.1730. The downward trend for ADA continued into the beginning of the week, with the token falling to $1.12 today, indicating a decline of around 6%. However, thanks to the overall resilience of the Cardano ecosystem, its value has shown a more stable trajectory in the long term. Additionally, the total value locked (TVL) in Cardano's decentralized finance (DeFi) space has increased by 242% since early November, reaching $709 million on December 3, before experiencing a slight drop to $631 million.
Potential Collaboration Between XRP and Cardano
Charles Hoskinson also engaged in discussions about a potential collaboration between Cardano and the XRP ecosystems with Ripple's CEO Brad Garlinghouse and David Schwartz. He noted that these discussions, which followed the resolution of previous disputes, had gone positively.
The discussions particularly focused on how XRP could be integrated within the framework of Cardano's Midnight and Marlowe projects. Midnight stands out as a privacy-focused sidechain, while Marlowe is an open-source toolkit used to develop smart contracts on Cardano. Integrating XRP as a third token alongside Midnight's dual token model of NIGHT and DUST could expand the use cases for XRP.
On the other hand, Hoskinson expressed that Cardano plans to participate in Ripple's upcoming stable cryptocurrency project called RLUSD. This indicates that RLUSD may also be usable on Cardano after its initial launch on XRP Ledger (XRPL) and Ethereum.