Phish, Mint, Repeat: Humanity Protocol's $H Token Still Swimming With the Fishes 🐟

Humanity Protocol confirmed that a targeted phishing attack against one of its directors caused the permanent compromise of the project's BNB Chain deployment, according to a June 12 incident update based on an independent investigation by Quantstamp. The protocol stated that the attacker impersonated crypto exchange Bithumb in a phishing email sent to a director who had previously been in contact with the exchange. Opening the attached file installed remote-access malware that gave the attacker full remote-desktop control without triggering endpoint security, allowing the theft of wallet data and private keys stored on the device.

Quantstamp's report said the malware tooling and certificate-signing patterns observed were "characteristic of DPRK-linked intrusions," though it stopped short of a definitive attribution. The attacker used the stolen keys to upgrade a contract on Ethereum and move roughly 141.18 million $H tokens, then took control of a ProxyAdmin contract on BNB Smart Chain to mint additional $H. The newly minted tokens were sold into liquidity pools across Uniswap and PancakeSwap over roughly eight hours, severely damaging liquidity and triggering a sharp collapse in the token's market price. Humanity Protocol stressed that the incident did not stem from a vulnerability in the underlying smart contracts themselves but from unauthorized administrative access.

The project's Ethereum token contract was frozen using a clean multisig wallet that the attacker never controlled, and the canonical Humanity Mainnet bridge remains unaffected. The BNB Chain deployment, however, has been deemed permanently compromised because the attacker retains administrative control and can continue minting new tokens. "This must be abandoned," the team wrote regarding the BSC deployment.

Market reaction was volatile. $H rallied more than 42% in 24 hours to $0.50, pushing market capitalization above $800 million, with derivatives Open Interest jumping 131% to $213.10 million as fresh leveraged positions entered the market. Short liquidations reached roughly $1.55 million against long liquidations of about $282,000 during the move. The Relative Strength Index recovered to 57.16, and price approached the next major resistance at $0.718, with the $1.00 mark cited as a subsequent target. Crypto researcher ZachXBT separately pointed to supply concentration concerns and questioned whether the incident was theft or market maker-related.

The relief rally proved short-lived. $H reached a high of $0.609 on Sunday, June 14, before correcting by 40% over the following 24 hours and falling 73.8% within roughly 48 hours. The token has dropped from a low of $0.052 to $0.554 over five days, only to reverse, with the $0.20-$0.25 local supply zone already tested as resistance and the short-term bias flipping bearish.