Manta Network experiences DDoS attack amid exchange listing

Over 135 million RPC requests flooded Manta blockchain’s nodes on Thursday.

Zero-knowledge proof powered layer-2 blockchain Manta Network experienced a widespread distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack amid a successful token listing on multiple exchanges.

As told by Kenny Li, co-founder of p0x labs, the cryptographic development team behind Manta Network, the blockchain’s nodes experienced over 135 million remote procedure call (RPC) requests on Jan. 18. “This is a very aggressive and timed attack,” said Li, while stating that “the blockchain is running safely” and “funds are safe.” However, Li warned that “communication between apps and the blockchain is severely limited” for the time being. The co-founder commented:

“Rest assured, we are not going anywhere. We have built for three years, and we see no end in sight. Thank you so much for your support as a community.”

The same day, Manta tokens began trading on multiple exchanges, including Binance, Bithumb, and Kucoin. At the time of publication, the Manta token is valued at $2.27, indicating a fully diluted market cap of $2.27 billion. Over $686 million worth of Manta exchanged hands in the first few hours of trading.

On July 19, 2023, Cointelegraph reported that p0x labs raised $25 million in its Series A funding round. The firm also introduced the testnet of its layer-2 infrastructure, Manta Pacific, which entered mainnet on September 12, 2023. The testnet launch in July 2023 saw the creation of 150,000 wallets and over 3.5 million transactions.

Meanwhile, Manta Atlantic’s flagship nonfungible token private offering platform launched in April 2023 and has since minted over 300,000 zero-knowledge soulbond tokens across key ecosystem partners, including Arbitrum, Galxe, Linea and CyberConnect.

Related: ZK-focused Manta Pacific opts out of OP Stack for Polygon CDK