From $0.395 down to $0.123, a 69% drop in two days: the chain was hacked and shut down twice, while the coin first shot to the moon and then crashed back to where it started. INIT rode the roller coaster to the very end over these three days.
#INIT The chain shut down twice, while the coin first gained 228% and then fell 69%. Who exactly is behind this wild ride? I’ll break down the numbers from these three days, one by one.
Current price: approximately $0.1228 (Binance INIT/USDT, snapshot taken before 15:30 Beijing time on November 13); 24-hour open: $0.13067, high: $0.13899, low: $0.10799, down approximately 6.0% over 24 hours. But that was just the tail end—the real drama unfolded over the previous two days: it opened at $0.1204 on November 9, surged to $0.395 in the early hours of November 11, and gained 228% in three days; then it plunged from $0.395 to a low of $0.1105 on November 12, dropping 72% in two days. Today’s $0.1228 has basically brought it back to square one. Its market cap is now only around $17 million–$26 million (figures vary by platform), down about 91% from its all-time high of $1.42.
First incident, October 23: A MoveVM cached script vulnerability let hackers mint unbacked coins out of thin air. About $2.7 million was stolen, and the chain was halted for nine days, only restarting on November 2.
Second incident, November 9: Using leaked Google Cloud (GCP) credentials, hackers gained access to Anvil, the rollup hosting platform, and forged five IBC withdrawals from rollups, transferring about $3.27 million in assets. Of that, $2.16 million remains trapped on the halted chain, inaccessible. The hackers sold some of the assets on an on-chain DEX and withdrew 13,400 TIA, 8,000 USDC.inj, and 597,000 Noble USDC. At 06:18 UTC on November 10, Initia halted the chain for a second time. There is still no restart date; the team says it will rebuild the infrastructure from scratch, which will take “much longer than a routine restart,” and has promised to fully restore the backing for the stolen assets.
Normally, a chain getting hacked twice should send its token straight to zero. But INIT surged after the news broke: from $0.1204 on November 9 to $0.3319 on November 10, then $0.395 on November 11. I think there were two reasons: first, the hackers didn’t touch INIT itself, and once the chain halted, the $2.16 million in stolen funds was frozen on-chain—like a robber getting locked inside the vault. Second, the market cap was tiny, just over $20 million, so even a little money in perpetual futures could send the price soaring. On November 10, trading volume was about $84.8 million, roughly 8.9 times the average over the past 30 days. It was all speculative money betting against itself.
The funding rate for perpetual futures stayed negative for 24 consecutive hours, briefly hitting -1.7% per hour in the early hours of November 11. Short sellers were paying longs, signaling extremely bearish market sentiment. Even so, the token price slid from $0.395 all the way to $0.11. Binance perpetual open interest halved from $22.5 million on the evening of November 10 to $9.6 million on the morning of November 12, with more than half the leveraged capital fleeing. Shorts paid, longs tried to catch a falling knife, and neither side came out ahead. All that was left was volatility itself.
This rally in INIT wasn’t a reassessment of its value. It was a three-day spectacle fueled by a small market cap, a halted chain, and perpetual futures speculation: the worse the news, the higher the price flew—then it came crashing back down to earth. My view is that until the chain restarts, this token has no fundamentals to speak of; its price is just a gauge of market sentiment. What would change my mind? An official restart date and a full recovery plan for the stolen assets, funding rates turning positive, and open interest building back up. Only when all three happen would it be worth reassessing. On the other hand, if the restart keeps getting delayed or there’s a third incident, even the $0.11 low may not hold. My stance is simple: I’ll watch this kind of counterintuitive “chain down, token up” action from the sidelines. I won’t jump in; I’ll wait until the chain restarts.
1. When will the chain restart? The team has only said it will take “longer than a routine restart,” without giving a date;
2. When will the details of the full recovery plan for the stolen assets be announced?
3. Will the $0.11 level hold (the November 12 low was $0.1105)?
4. When will the funding rate turn positive?
The chain was halted twice, and the token first surged 228% before dropping 69%. Do you think this “the worse the news, the higher the price” action means someone is buying the dip, or is it just a small-cap token being used as a casino? Share your thoughts in the comments.
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