$27M PAID Token Dump Raises Inside-Job Questions for Paid Network

An attacker minted 59,471,745.571 PAID tokens out of nothing and sold them into the PAID/ETH liquidity pool on Uniswap, extracting value from the liquidity providers on the other side of the trade.

The numbers: 2079.603371141493 WETH was swapped out, worth $3,104,887.33 at the time, while 594,717,455.71 PAID — worth $24,313,147 — remained sitting unsold in the attacker's account. Combined, the total value extracted came to $27,418,034.33.

Signs of an inside job

Pseudonymous developer Banteg suggested on Twitter that the pattern looked like one founder rugging another, pointing to on-chain burn and mint transactions as evidence.

That theory aligns with a finding from researcher n2ckchong, who noted that Paid Network's deployer wallet — an externally owned account — transferred ownership of a contract to the attacker's address roughly 30 minutes before the mint took place.

As in most such cases, it will be nearly impossible for the project's founders to conclusively prove they weren't involved, leaving the team in an awkward position regardless of whether the true explanation turns out to be a compromised private key or something else entirely.

Paid Network's CEO, Kyle Chasse — a YouTuber who has described himself as a "master disruptor crypto OG" — became a target of suspicion, including an unusually personal on-chain note left by someone in one of the transaction messages, suggesting they believed the incident was an inside job rather than an external exploit.

The Twitter account WARONRUGS had flagged this exact minting vulnerability more than a month before it was actually used. Separately, someone sent a message to the minter's address sarcastically thanking "Russian Hackers" for their work. The broader lesson offered alongside all this: protocols that market themselves as guaranteed "100x" gems are worth treating with extra caution.

Timeline and price impact

The unauthorized mint occurred just after 18:00 UTC, with the tokens sold off over the following 30 minutes. That selling pressure pushed PAID's price down from roughly $2.86 to about $0.32.

Official response

Paid Network said on Twitter that it was investigating the incident, had pulled liquidity, and was deploying a new smart contract that would restore all user balances to their pre-hack state. Users with tokens staked, or held in Lpool or UniFarm, were told their PAID would be sent to them manually, with further updates promised.

Whether this was an external exploit, a coordinated hack, or an inside job carried out by the team itself remains unresolved pending Paid Network's official post-mortem.