Review and Reflection on the Delisting of Pundi AI by the Korean Exchange

In mid-July, Pundi AI suffered a hacker attack, resulting in the abnormal issuance of 1 million tokens. After the incident, the team quickly took action to freeze and recover assets, ultimately successfully recovering nearly 90% of the stolen funds and covering over one million dollars for full user compensation. However, Pundi AI was notified by the Korea Digital Asset Exchange Association (DAXA) to be delisted from Korean exchanges due to "untimely information disclosure."

Event Key Timeline:

• March 2: Pundi AI announced a rebranding and token swap, at which time the hacker had already infiltrated but was not detected.
• July 12: Hackers launched an attack, resulting in an abnormal issuance of 1 million tokens. On the same day, the team froze transfers and initiated tracking, and in the evening, the CEO publicly disclosed the contract vulnerability to the community.
• July 14: Disclose the investigation results and solutions of the attack incident to the exchange, and communicate with DAXA.
• July 28: Upbit and Bithumb announced that they will delist PundiAI on August 28.
• July 31: Official statement recovers over 80% of assets, full user compensation completed within 11 days.

Danny Lim, co-founder of Pundi AI, stated that hackers exploited a vulnerability in the token migration contract to gain administrator access to the contract ahead of its deployment in February. This "front-running attack" technique is very precise, requiring accurate calculations of transaction timing and blocks. Recently, several projects have encountered similar attacks, and Pundi AI publicly shared the details of the incident to alert peers to this potential security risk.

Danny admitted that the team chose to quietly track and freeze the assets first in order to recover them to the greatest extent possible, and then make it public. This strategy proved effective, successfully intercepting about 95% of the stolen assets. However, because the information was not made public immediately, it was deemed by DAXA as "untimely disclosure."

Regarding the handling of DAXA, Danny expressed understanding but also regret. He believes the biggest lesson is that in the Korean market, the timeliness and transparency of information are more important than anything else. This serves as a wake-up call for all projects that are launching or planning to launch in Korea.

After being delisted, Pundi AI plans to increase its investment in decentralized exchanges, promote new AI data products, and launch a token buyback and airdrop plan to give back to the community. Danny stated that leaving the Korean exchange has "unlocked the seal," allowing for more flexible use of token economics.

Regarding AI data products, Danny introduced the recently soft-launched Data Pump, which is a "Launchpad for AI datasets" aimed at tokenizing data. Users can package content data into NFTs and collateralize them on the platform to generate tokens for trading. He emphasized that Pundi AI focuses on high-quality data in specialized niches and has developed AI AMM capabilities.

Regarding the development of the Web3 AI sector, Danny believes that the current bottleneck lies in the lack of truly useful applications. He stated that the value of blockchain in the AI field mainly lies at the data level, as it can protect user data privacy. However, ordinary users have not yet realized the importance of data privacy. He predicts that the true boom in the Web3 AI space may require traditional AI giants to actively embrace blockchain technology and provide users with data protection features.