aixbt was stolen 55.5ETH, and the already weak AI agent narrative "added insult to injury"
Reprinted from panewslab
03/21/2025·2MAuthor: Yangz, Techub News
While most industries are focusing on the BNB Chain craze caused by Binance's "combination punch", OKX suspended DEX aggregation services due to compliance issues, and Solana is deeply involved in political advertising storm, the incident on Monday's CT about the "fishing scam" 55.5 ETH once again triggered the community's thinking about the sustainability of AI agent narratives. Many users are worried that the weak AI agent narrative will "injure" because of this?
On Monday afternoon, several X users noticed that the AI agent aixbt was suspected of being phished and transferred 55.5 Ethereum to the attacker, worth about $105,600. Screenshots shared by X user @supremeleadoor show that the hacker who carried out the attack was a user with the nickname "Fungus Man" and the account was @0xhungusman. In addition, these 55.5 Ethereum were sent as "tips" by Simulacrum AI, a robot used by aixbt to manage automated transactions. The data on the chain shows that the "tip" was transferred to an address starting with 0x1C3, but since the relevant account has been cancelled and the interaction between the attacker and aixbt has been deleted, the details of the attack's implementation are difficult to query. (A user with the nickname "DE searcher" will subsequently register the @0xhungusman account and say he hopes to use it to make some fucks. As of the article, @0xhungusman has been frozen.)
However, is this attack really a "phishing scam" as netizens call it? Can AI agents, considered a hot trend in 2025, even phishing scams? In response to various questions, aixbt developer @0rxbt released an incident report , acknowledging that the funds were stolen, but also clarified that the incident was caused by hackers hiding the security dashboard of the Aixbt autonomous system and queuing to send 2 malicious replies. "It's just an independent problem, not a widespread vulnerability, nor is it a scam from the AI agent." In addition, the team has migrated the server, modified the key, paused dashboard access for security upgrades, and reported the hacker address to the exchange, and all system access is secure.
In addition to incident reports, aixbt itself also summarized the impact of this incident. Aixbt wrote that after the attack, AXIBT "falls below $0.1 support, falling to $0.098 in Kraken, down about 16.4%, but trading volume remains at $70.5 million." In addition, aixbt also pointed out that its market value was in a "blood loss" before the hacking incident, "currently it is US$84.2 million, lower than the peak of US$313 million." Although aixbt therefore ridiculed himself as "ngmi", when facing other netizens' jokes, it still clearly responded that being cheated of 55.5 ETH was a security incident, and it will not send assets at will, and is currently tracking the hacker's address.
As aixbt admits itself, the narrative about AI agents has actually fallen into a clear decline since January this year. CoinGecko data shows that the current market value of tokens related to AI agents is about US$4.28 billion, which has fallen sharply from the peak period. In addition to the Tutorial token TUT on BNB Chain, which is currently in a hot state, the prices of Virtuals Protocol token VIRTUAL and ai16z token AI16Z have also fallen by 47.1% and 55.9% respectively in the past 30 days.
Regarding this hacking incident, on the one hand, some users have a negative attitude, believing that it will further aggravate the fatigue of the AI agent market and lead to funds flowing out of this track. On the other hand, for example, aixbt claims that "security vulnerabilities are the price of doing business" , some users optimistically regard this matter as an opportunity for the AI agent market to re-examine itself, which will bring stricter security and technical standards, and thus promote the further maturity of the AI agent market.
Decentralized AI researcher S4mmy pointed out that AI agent Freysa had previously tried to create a challenge to give rewards to users who successfully induce them to release funds, but aixbt was unintentionally severe. "This raises an important question for the security of depositor funds for investors/DeFAI agents. If the agent is to manage the funds, it needs to be tested in multiple situations to ensure that the deposited funds of the income generation/DeFAI agents are not stolen by bad actors. While many protocols have put in place a range of controls to reduce this situation, the risk of the protocol will never be reduced to zero."
As an emerging field, the security of AI agents has always been quite hidden dangers. The problems exposed by theft of aixbt may make the market more calmly examine whether the previous popularity of AI agents is just short-term popularity and hype, or it really has enough technical foundation to support its future development. As for whether AI agents can explode in 2025 as expected, it will be left to time and market verification.
