Layer 1 protocol Saga suffered a security exploit on its SagaEVM chain, draining nearly $7 million and prompting the project to pause the network while it finalizes its investigation and remediation efforts.
In a Wednesday blog post, Saga said the exploit resulted in the unauthorized withdrawal of roughly $7 million in USDC, which was subsequently bridged out of SagaEVM and converted to ETH. The team has identified the wallet “0x2044…c6ecb” as belonging to the exploiter.
“SagaEVM remains paused while we finalize the results of our investigation into the Jan 21 exploit,” the project wrote on X, noting that it halted the SagaEVM chain at block height 6593800 after detecting suspicious activity.
“We’re working with partners on remediation and will publish a post-mortem once findings are fully validated,” Saga said. It is coordinating with exchanges and bridge operators to blacklist the attacker’s address and mitigate further risk.
According to the project’s investigation update, the exploit involved a coordinated sequence of contract deployments, liquidity movements and cross-chain interactions that allowed the attacker to extract funds rapidly.
Saga said the incident did not affect its broader infrastructure, including the SSC mainnet or core consensus layer, and found no evidence of validator compromise, consensus failure or leaked signer keys.
The breach comes amid elevated crypto theft, with Chainalysis estimating losses of more than $3.41 billion in 2025, up from $3.38 billion the previous year.
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