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. The incident, which was confirmed by Serenity Shield in a post on February 27, prompted the project to suspend all trades, deposits, and withdrawals of SERSH on centralized exchanges. The project announced its intention to relaunch with a new token contract, although no specific timeline was provided.
In the same announcement, Serenity Shield stated that it is actively working to redeploy all liquidity to the new smart contracts and will replace any liquidity lost in the exploit. The exploit occurred at 9:11 am UTC on February 27, when 6.9 million SERSH tokens, valued at $0.82 each, were transferred to an unidentified third-party wallet. Following the exploit, the price of SERSH declined for approximately five hours before dropping by 98% in just five minutes, falling from $0.565 to $0.009, according to CoinGecko.
Although SERSH experienced a partial recovery and reached a price of $0.23 at the time of publication, the news was met with criticism from users, including “Hamster Altcoins,” who claimed that the administrators of Serenity Shield’s Telegram channel were muting individuals who raised concerns. The use of a MetaMask hot wallet to store funds was also 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 18.