The value of Serenity Shield’s token, known as SERSH, plummeted by nearly 99% after approximately 6.9 million tokens, worth $5.6 million at the time, were stolen from one of the team’s MetaMask wallets. Serenity Shield acknowledged the exploit in a post on February 27th and announced that all trading, deposits, and withdrawals of SERSH on centralized exchanges would be suspended. The project stated that it would relaunch with a new token contract, although no timeline was provided. Serenity Shield emphasized that this decision was made to protect the interests of its community and reduce exposure to the security incident. The project also assured its community that it was actively working to redeploy liquidity to the new smart contracts and would replace any liquidity lost in the exploit.
The exploit occurred at 9:11 am UTC on February 27th when 6.9 million SERSH tokens, valued at $0.82 each, were transferred from one of the project’s MetaMask wallets to an unidentified third-party wallet. Following the exploit, the price of SERSH decreased steadily for approximately five hours before experiencing a sudden drop of 98% within a five-minute period, falling from $0.565 to $0.009, according to CoinGecko. However, the token partially recovered to $0.23 at the time of publication.
The news of the exploit was met with criticism from some users, including “Hamster Altcoins,” who accused the administrators of Serenity Shield’s Telegram channel of muting individuals who were questioning the incident. Additionally, the use of a MetaMask hot wallet to store funds was criticized, as hot wallets are considered less secure than cold wallets, which store private keys offline.
The SERSH token was launched less than ten weeks prior to the exploit, on December 18th.