In short
- Monad users reported fake transfers shortly after Monday’s mainnet and token launch.
- Attackers broadcast fake ERC-20 events that showed explorers as real activity, Monad’s CTO and co-founder said.
- The incident coincided with rising MON trade and renewed attention for the chain.
Bad actors began spoofing token transfers on Monad less than two days after the network and its MON token officially went live on Monday, and within a day after dropped and publicly sold tokens became accessible to users during the chain’s initial period of liquidity and onboarding.
The spoofing was first reported by Monad CTO and co-founder James Hunsaker, who noted that the transactions appeared as standard token transfers on explorers, despite no money movements or signatures being imitated from the wallets.
“Warning: There are fake ERC-20 transfers pretending to come from my wallet,” says Hunsaker revealed Tuesday evening on X, citing a Monad user who alerted him to the transactions.
Hunsaker added that ERC-20 is “just a token interface standard” and it makes it easy for someone to write a contract that meets the required features while allowing unauthorized address entries.
Such a structure allows malicious contracts to create events to make activities appear legitimate, even when no actual wallet approval has occurred.
Hunsaker added that the malicious activity is not a bug on Monad’s blockchain, but is instead “spoofing within their smart contract to trick people.”
Declutter has contacted Hunsaker and Monad for additional comment.
In one sample transaction provided by Hunsaker, the series of transfers followed a usual pattern EVM based chains where attackers deploy their own contracts and emit events that resemble real token transfers even though no wallets signed anything and moved no tokens.
Explorers display these events as regular activity, which can mislead users who may be checking wallet history.
In this case, the contracts also generated fake swap calls and other artificial signatures that appeared as actual trading within the MON ecosystem.
The idea is ostensibly to give the appearance of legitimate activity on a new network when users open wallets and move tokens for the first time.
The fake transfers come amid intensified activity around Monad following the launch of the network and the release of its MON token.
About 76,000 wallets claimed MON last month, but didn’t receive their tokens until Monday, when the network and its token went live.
A day after launch, MON rose 19% to $0.042. At the time of writing, the token is up 43% on the day, with its market cap at around $500 million, per CoinGecko. facts.
Monad is touted as one competitor of Ethereum and Solanawhich positions itself as a high-performance, EVM-compatible network designed to process transactions in parallel and support throughput-intensive applications.
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