A Robin Hood-esque attacker steals $52 million from Cashio, then returns smaller amounts and pledges to donate the rest to charity

A hacker was able to exploit an infinite mint glitch in the protocol of Cashio, a Solana stablecoin project. They were able to pull around $50 million out of the platform, while also tanking the value of the $CASH token in the process. The attacker left a note in the input data of their Ethereum transactions that "Account with less 100k have been returned. all other money will be donated to charity."

Saber, the providers of the Cashio liquidity pool, published a postmortem of the attack in which they wrote that "We do not have the money to pay back depositors." The hack was the second largest in Solana history, behind the February Wormhole hack. Saber entreated the hacker to return the funds, writing, "accounts with over $100k are often users' life savings on leverage, and many of us will seriously be affected financially after this incident."

On March 28, the attacker sent a message saying that "the intention was only to take money from those who do not need it, not from those who do", and invited users who had over $100,000 to apply to receive their funds back with "an explanation of the source of this money and why you need it back. more detail is better. money will not be refund to rich american and european that don't need it." Somewhat strangely, Cashio themselves began hosting a website to allow affected users to plead with the hacker to return the money.