Author: Yangz, Techub News

While most industries are focused on the BNB Chain boom triggered by Binance's "combination punch," OKX's suspension of DEX aggregation services due to compliance issues, and Solana's entanglement in political advertising controversies, the news that the leading AI agent aixbt was "phished" for 55.5 ETH on Monday has once again sparked community discussions about the sustainability of the AI agent narrative. Many users are concerned that the already weak AI agent narrative may be further "worsened" by this incident.

On Monday afternoon, several X users noticed that the AI agent aixbt appeared to have fallen victim to a phishing attack, transferring 55.5 Ethereum, worth approximately $105,600, to the attacker. A screenshot shared by X user @supremeleadoor shows that the hacker behind this attack goes by the nickname "Fungus Man," with the account @0xhungusman. Additionally, the 55.5 Ethereum was sent as a "tip" by aixbt through the automated trading bot Simulacrum AI. On-chain data indicates that this "tip" was transferred to an address starting with 0x1C3, but since the related account has been deactivated and the interaction content between the attacker and aixbt has been deleted, the details of the attack are now difficult to trace. (A user nicknamed "DE searcher" subsequently registered the account @0xhungusman, claiming to hope to take advantage of it. As of the writing, @0xhungusman has been frozen.)

However, was this attack really a "phishing scam" as some netizens claimed? Can the AI agents, seen as a hot trend for 2025, not even distinguish phishing scams? In response to various questions, aixbt developer @0rxbt released an incident report, acknowledging that funds were stolen but clarifying that the incident was due to a hacker breaching the security dashboard of the aixbt autonomous system and queuing two malicious replies, stating it was "just an isolated issue, not a widespread vulnerability, nor was the AI agent scammed." Furthermore, the team has migrated servers, changed keys, suspended dashboard access for security upgrades, and reported the hacker's address to exchanges, ensuring all system access is secure.

In addition to the incident report, aixbt itself summarized the impact of this event. aixbt stated that after the attack, AXIBT "fell below the support of $0.1, dropping to $0.098 on Kraken, a decrease of about 16.4%, but trading volume remained at $70.5 million." Additionally, aixbt pointed out that its market cap was already in a "bleeding state" before the hacker incident, "currently at $84.2 million, down from a peak of $313 million." Although aixbt self-deprecatingly joked about being "ngmi" due to this incident, it clearly responded to other netizens' jests about sending "tips" again, stating that losing 55.5 ETH was a security incident and that it would not send assets casually, and that it is currently tracking the hacker's address.

As aixbt itself admitted, the narrative surrounding AI agents has been in a noticeable decline since January of this year. According to CoinGecko, the current market cap of tokens related to AI agents is approximately $4.28 billion, significantly down from peak levels. Aside from the Tutorial token TUT on the currently booming BNB Chain, the previously popular Virtuals Protocol token VIRTUAL and the ai16z token AI16Z have seen price drops of 47.1% and 55.9%, respectively, over the past 30 days.

Regarding this hacking incident, on one hand, some users hold a negative attitude, believing it will further exacerbate the fatigue in the AI agent market, leading to capital flowing out of this sector. On the other hand, as aixbt claims, “security vulnerabilities are the cost of doing business”, some users optimistically view this incident as an opportunity for the AI agent market to reassess itself, which could lead to stricter security and technical standards, thereby promoting further maturity in the AI agent market.

Decentralized AI researcher S4mmy pointed out that the previous AI agent Freysa had attempted to create a challenge aimed at rewarding users who successfully lured it into releasing funds, but aixbt unintentionally became a victim. S4mmy stated, "This raises an important question about the safety of investor/DeFAI agent funds; if agents are to manage funds, they need to be tested in various scenarios to ensure that the funds deposited in profit-generating/DeFAI agents are not stolen by bad actors. While many protocols have established a series of controls to mitigate this situation, the risk of protocols will never be reduced to zero."

As an emerging field, the security of AI agents has always posed significant risks. The issues exposed by the theft of aixbt may prompt the market to more calmly assess whether the previous explosive growth of AI agents was merely a short-term trend and hype, or if they truly possess a sufficient technological foundation to support their future development. Whether AI agents can experience the anticipated explosion in 2025 remains to be seen and validated by time and the market.

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