Saga Pauses SagaEVM After $7 Million Exploit

Blockchain developer Saga paused its SagaEVM chainlet on January 21, 2026, after detecting a security exploit that resulted in the theft of approximately 7 million in digital assets. The incident, which occurred on the Ethereum-compatible chain within the Saga ecosystem, prompted the team to halt operations at block height 6,593,800 to prevent further losses and conduct a thorough investigation.

The exploit involved a coordinated series of smart contract deployments, crosschain transactions, and liquidity withdrawals, according to Saga's initial assessment. Attackers extracted funds including USDC, yUSD, ETH, and tBTC from the SagaEVM chainlet, as well as related stablecoins Colt and Mustang. The stolen assets were then bridged to the Ethereum mainnet and swapped into ETH through decentralized exchanges such as 1inch, CowSwap, UniV4, and KyberSwap. Saga identified the attacker's wallet address as 0x2044697623afa31459642708c83f04ecef8c6ecb and is coordinating with exchanges and bridge operators to blacklist it and pursue recovery.

Security researchers have pointed to a vulnerability in the protocol's crosschain messaging system, specifically the InterBlockchain Communication...