MAPO Token Fell Nearly 30% After an Attacker Flooded the Market With Quadrillions of Fake Tokens
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MAPO, the native token of the MAP Protocol Bitcoin Layer-2 and omnichain interoperability project, was trading around $0.003 before the Butter Bridge exploit on May 20 and dropped to approximately $0.001558 in the immediate aftermath, a decline of nearly 30%. The collapse was driven not by selling pressure from genuine holders but by the appearance of 1 quadrillion minted tokens entering the market, creating instant and catastrophic dilution that destabilized trading pairs and evaporated liquidity across connected pools. Holders and liquidity providers faced immediate losses as the token's value was effectively destroyed by the artificial supply expansion before the market had any time to respond.
The attacker extracted approximately $290,000 in total value by swapping portions of the fake supply into ETH and draining Uniswap liquidity pools before the price collapse made further swaps unviable. The speed of the extraction relative to the scale of the mint reflects a calculated approach: the attacker minted an amount so enormous that even converting a tiny fraction of it into real assets before liquidity disappeared generated meaningful returns. For existing MAPO holders, the damage is severe and largely irreversible in the short term, as the token's market structure will need significant intervention, whether through supply burns, contract updates, or formal recovery mechanisms, before confidence in the asset can be meaningfully rebuilt. The project's silence in the immediate aftermath of the exploit has added uncertainty to an already distressed situation for the community.
