Initia (INIT): the rollup-hosting layer 1, its token, its audits and the 23 October halt

Initia, the crypto project behind the INIT token, has been stopped since 15:41:30 UTC on 23 October 2026. Its layer 1 chain and every rollup running on it stopped producing blocks after what co-founder Ezaan Mangalji called a previously unknown bug in the MoveVM code that allowed unauthorised minting. The last block of the mainnet, interwoven-1, is number 23,365,925. It was still the latest one when Coindaro queried a public node at 18:30 UTC.

The halt is now part of the record. It is not the whole of Initia crypto, though. The project is a Cosmos SDK chain built by former Terraform Labs developers and launched on 24 April 2025, and its bet is that rollups should be the product rather than an add-on. One token secures the base chain, pays the incentives that bring rollups in and travels over the bridges between them.

What follows covers that design, the people and the money behind it, how the 1 billion INIT are split and released, what the audits covered, and what is known about the halt as of about 18:35 UTC on 23 October. There is no price forecast here, and nothing on this page is investment advice.

What Initia crypto is: a layer 1 built to host rollups

Initia’s documentation splits the system in three. Initia L1 is the base chain and, in the docs’ words, the “central liquidity hub” for every connected rollup. The Interwoven Rollups are layer 2 chains whose developers pick their own smart-contract virtual machine, gas token and other settings. The Interwoven Stack is the toolkit used to build and connect them.

The Block calls these rollups Minitias, both in its September 2024 funding story and in its March 2025 airdrop story. Initia Labs gives its GitHub organisation a grander name, “The Multichain Garden of Eden”. TechCrunch, in September 2024, reported that the startup bills itself as the “iOS for web3”: a layer 1 that lets separate app chains work with each other while each keeps the freedom to tune its own execution environment.

According to the docs, the L1 has four jobs. It secures rollups through token bridging, state commitments and fraud proofs. It hosts the central exchange, InitiaDEX. It acts as hub and router for messages and tokens between chains. And it runs two incentive systems of its own, Enshrined Liquidity and the Vested Interest Program (VIP).

The L1 code is public in the initia-labs/initia repository on GitHub, written in Go, created on 12 October 2023. The last stable release before the halt was v1.4.10, published on 29 September 2026. Three alpha builds of a v1.5.0 line came out between 11 and 20 May 2026; no date has been given for the final version.

How the interwoven stack connects the L1 and its rollups

A team that wants its own chain on Initia starts from one of three ready-made virtual machines. MiniEVM runs Ethereum-style contracts. MiniMove runs the Move language on MoveVM, the virtual machine whose implementation Zon blamed on 23 October. MiniWasm runs WebAssembly contracts, a format common across Cosmos. Gas can be paid in a token the rollup chooses, so an app does not have to charge its users in INIT.

OPinit: an optimistic bridge with a watchman

Rollups talk to the L1 through the OPinit Framework. Its bridge is two Cosmos SDK modules: OPhost, on the L1, and OPchild, inside each rollup. The design is optimistic, like the one behind many Ethereum layer 2 networks. A rollup’s reported state is accepted unless someone proves it wrong before a challenge window closes. Our glossary entry on the rollup explains the general idea.

Two programs run alongside the bridge. The Executor handles deposits and withdrawals, sends the rollup’s outputs to the L1 and posts its transaction batches to Celestia, which Initia uses for data availability. It can also pass prices from Connect, the oracle on the L1, down to the rollup. The Challenger is a separate process that watches the Executor’s output proposals and challenges any it finds invalid.

The price of an optimistic bridge is the wait. Moving tokens from the L1 to a rollup is quick; moving them back can take days. Minitswap is Initia’s workaround, a DEX on the L1 that lets users swap bridged tokens back to INIT without sitting out the challenge period. The docs name three problems it was built for: long withdrawals, the risk of rollups run by a single sequencer, and pools too thin to give fair prices.

Around that core sit the parts users actually see: .init usernames (announced in February 2024), an auto-signing “ghost wallet” so apps do not ask for a signature on every click, the explorer at scan.initia.xyz, and InterwovenKit, a React kit that puts the Initia wallet inside an app.

Enshrined Liquidity and VIP give INIT three jobs at once

On most proof-of-stake chains, a holder has to choose. Tokens either sit with a validator, securing the chain, or sit in a liquidity pool, earning fees. Enshrined Liquidity removes part of that choice. Governance can whitelist InitiaDEX positions that pair INIT with another token, and those positions can then be staked with validators next to plain INIT. One position earns staking rewards and trading fees together. The tokenomics page goes as far as saying the mechanism “replaces the typical L1 PoS system”.

VIP is what ties rollups to the L1. It pays rewards in escrowed INIT, called esINIT, to rollups that have reached a minimum INIT TVL and been whitelisted by L1 governance. Each rollup then passes rewards on to its users according to scores it defines itself.

Every reward stage is split between two pools. The Balance Pool pays rollups according to how much INIT sits on their OPinit bridge; the Weight Pool pays according to gauge votes. Governance sets the ratio. esINIT cannot be moved at first: holders vest it by keeping a VIP score over several periods. A quarter of the supply, 250 million INIT, is reserved for the program.

The deal on offer to a rollup team is its own chain, a shared exchange and a flow of rewards, in return for users and INIT deposits. Several teams took it at launch in April 2025 and gave it back within eighteen months, as the governance records further down show.

From Terra to a halted mainnet: Initia’s history in dates

The founders’ story begins with a failure. The Block reported in February 2024 that Zon, then a smart-contract developer, and Stan Liu, who researched MEV, both worked at Terraform Labs, left to start a Cosmos DeFi chain, and stopped that fundraise after Terra collapsed in 2022, returning the money to investors. Initia was the second attempt. It also ran late: that same report said the mainnet was “tentatively” set for the second quarter of 2024. It went live in April 2025.

Date	Event
2022	Terra collapses; the future founders stop an earlier fundraise and return the money (The Block)
October 2023	Pre-seed from Binance Labs, amount not disclosed; the initia-labs/initia repository is created on 12 October
27 Feb 2024	$7.5M seed round announced; closed testnet live; team of about 25 people, based in Singapore
June 2024	Series A closes (announced in September)
18 Jun to 20 Nov 2024	Private audits by Zellic, ChainLight and OtterSec
25 Sep 2024	$14M Series A led by Theory Ventures, at a $350M token valuation
26 Sep 2024	$2.5M community round on Echo, at $250M (The Block reported it on “Thursday”)
Jan and Feb 2025	Three Code4rena audit competitions
31 Mar 2025	Airdrop of 50M INIT detailed
17 Apr 2025	Binance names INIT its 68th Launchpool project
24 Apr 2025	Mainnet and INIT go live; Binance spot listing at 11:00 UTC
23 May 2025	Chain TVL peaks at $42.15M on DefiLlama; the Foundation posts its plan to correct a staking-inflation setting wrong since genesis
Sep 2025 to Aug 2026	Several rollups leave VIP or wind down
29 Sep 2026	L1 release v1.4.10
23 Oct 2026, 15:41:30 UTC	L1 and rollups halted after a security incident

Who built Initia and who paid for it

Two co-founders are named in public sources. Ezaan Mangalji, who goes by Zon, is the one who speaks for the project, including on 23 October. Stan Liu is the other; TechCrunch named both in September 2024. The Block wrote in February 2024 that the team had hired from the core team of the Cosmos Hub and from Terra Station, once the largest Terra wallet. Initia.xyz has no team page, and Coindaro names nobody else.

There is also an Initia Foundation. It holds 7.75% of supply, which the docs say covers liquidity bootstrapping, genesis validator delegations and grants, and it posted a refresh of its validator delegation programme on the forum in October 2025. Where it is registered and who runs it, Coindaro could not find.

Money came in four rounds.

Date	Round	Amount	Investors
October 2023	Pre-seed	Not disclosed	Binance Labs (now YZi Labs)
27 Feb 2024	Seed	$7.5M	Delphi Ventures and Hack VC (co-leads), Nascent, Figment Capital, Big Brain, A.Capital, Celestia COO Nick White, angels
25 Sep 2024	Series A	$14M	Theory Ventures (lead, about 90% of the round per TechCrunch), Delphi Ventures, Hack VC, angels
26 Sep 2024	Echo community round	$2.5M	About 800 buyers, $5,000 cap each, $250M valuation

The Block and TechCrunch both gave a total of $22.5 million after the Series A, counting the earlier money from Delphi Ventures, Hack VC and Binance Labs. The seed and Series A alone make $21.5 million, so the gap would be the pre-seed; that is our arithmetic, since the pre-seed amount was never published. Crypto Briefing’s “about $24 million” matches neither total exactly. Angels in the Series A included Keone Hon of Monad Labs, Bryan Pellegrino of LayerZero Labs, Zaki Manion of Sommelier, Jordi Alexander of Selini Capital and Michael Egorov of Curve. Spencer Farrar, a partner at Theory Ventures, told TechCrunch that the two founders “have very deep technical expertise”.

Small buyers remember the Echo sale. It filled in under two hours on Cobie’s platform, two sources told The Block, at a valuation 28.57% below the Series A.

INIT tokenomics: 1 billion tokens, half of them for rewards

The supply is fixed at 1,000,000,000 INIT. Coindaro checked it against the chain: the supply query for the native denomination on rest.initia.xyz returned exactly 1 billion INIT at 18:19 UTC on 23 October, and the same figure again at 18:30 UTC. The official tokenomics page divides it into eight parts.

Allocation	INIT	Share	Release schedule (docs)
Enshrined Liquidity and staking rewards	250M	25%	5% of this pool a year at first (12.5M INIT), block by block
VIP rewards	250M	25%	7% of this pool a year at first (17.5M INIT), paid as esINIT
Investors (protocol sales)	152.5M	15.25%	25% after a 12-month cliff, then 75% linearly over 36 months
Team (protocol developers)	150M	15%	25% after a 12-month cliff, then 75% linearly over 36 months
Foundation	77.5M	7.75%	50% at launch, the rest every six months over 48 months
Binance launch campaign	60M	6%	Fully unlocked
Airdrop	50M	5%	Fully unlocked
Echo community sale	10M	1%	Four tranches of 2.5M at 12, 15, 18 and 24 months

INIT pays gas on the L1 and on eligible rollups, is delegated to secure the network, votes in governance and is the currency of VIP, as Binance Academy lists its uses. The docs call the 15.25% investor share “a distinct departure” from layer 1 chains with high investor allocations, and Zon told The Block in 2024 that Initia was “selling only 15% cumulatively to early contributors”. That is the project’s own reading of its numbers. Our explainer on token unlocks shows how to compare schedules across chains.

Staking emissions went wrong once already. A Foundation forum post of 23 May 2025 says the staking inflation parameter was set at genesis to 5% of total supply a year instead of 5% of the staking pool, so stakers and Enshrined Liquidity providers earned nearly four times the intended rate from launch until the fix. Governance corrected it, and the docs now say the emission schedule was “shortened slightly” to stay within the 250 million cap. It was a configuration error, not an exploit.

The unlock calendar, and a cliff extension Initia has not documented

The docs place the Echo tranches at 12, 15, 18 and 24 months after genesis. Counted from 24 April 2025 (our arithmetic), that gives 24 April 2026, 24 July 2026, 24 October 2026 and 24 April 2027. The third one falls on 24 October, the day after the halt, and the tracker Tokenomist also lists 24 October as the next unlock, for Echo buyers. Whether a stopped chain changes anything for that release, nobody has said.

The team and investor cliff is murkier. The docs, read on 23 October, still say 12 months, which would have ended on 24 April 2026. DefiLlama’s unlock page and syndicated news items from April 2026 say investors and protocol developers pushed the cliff to two years after launch, that is April 2027. Coindaro did not find Initia’s own notice of the change, so this page reports it as a claim. Tokenomist put circulating supply at about 210.79 million INIT, 21.08% of the total, at 18:15 UTC on 23 October.

The airdrop and the Binance share

The airdrop gave away 50 million INIT, 5% of supply. According to The Block, about 44.7 million went to 194,294 users of the 2024 testnet campaigns, about 2.25 million to active users of LayerZero, IBC and MilkyWay, and roughly 3 million to people who took part on Discord, Telegram and X. Internal contributors were left out. Claims stayed open for 30 days after mainnet.

Binance did not run an airdrop. It took part through its Launchpool, where users locked BNB, FDUSD or USDC to farm INIT, and through marketing. The docs give 60 million INIT, 6%, to the “Binance Launch Campaign” as a whole. Binance Academy says 30 million of those, 3% of supply, went to the Launchpool itself. Binance’s announcement and the trackers describe the other 30 million in different ways, and Coindaro has not settled which is right.

Rollups and apps on Initia, and the ones that closed

Initia publishes no count of rollups or users that Coindaro could verify. DefiLlama listings and governance records show a short list of live apps and a longer list of exits.

Echelon, a lending market written in Move, runs its own rollup and has filed VIP updates epoch after epoch. Inertia describes itself on DefiLlama as a lending and liquid-staking protocol. Civitia, which pitched itself to governance as an on-chain financial board game, has a rollup in VIP. Cabal is not a rollup at all: it automates staking, governance votes and reward collection on the L1, and governance whitelisted it for VIP in March 2026. InitiaDEX and Minitswap are the native exchange and bridge swap.

The exits are well documented. Infinity Ground Arcade posted its wind-down in December 2025. MilkyWay, a genesis rollup, was removed from VIP by on-chain proposal 75 in February 2026 after announcing it was shutting down. Intergaze left VIP in September 2025 and posted a wind-down notice for its rollup in April 2026. Embr wound down in May 2026.

Rave went last. Its rollup halted at block 32,380,209 on 3 August 2026, and the same day a team wallet repaid holders one for one on the L1: 187,609.16 INIT to 350 addresses, according to on-chain proposal 90. That proposal, meant to close Rave’s bridge, failed at execution and had to be resubmitted. A planned closure, then, with users repaid.

Initia’s TVL fell from $42.15 million to $5.73 million

By deposits, Initia is a small chain. The DefiLlama chain page tracks its total value locked in a daily series sampled at 00:00 UTC.

Date (00:00 UTC)	Chain TVL (DefiLlama)
6 May 2025 (first point)	$12.74M
23 May 2025 (peak)	$42.15M
1 Jul 2025	$14.07M
1 Oct 2025	$13.66M
1 Jan 2026	$3.95M
1 Apr 2026	$3.89M
1 Jul 2026	$2.95M
1 Oct 2026	$4.73M
23 Oct 2026	$5.73M

The 23 October point was taken at midnight, more than fifteen hours before the halt, so it measures nothing about the loss. Among protocols, InitiaDEX held $3.60 million; Cabal $2.13 million on Initia, out of $2.76 million across all its chains; the Echelon bridge $0.50 million; and the Inertia bridge $0.37 million, when Coindaro read the API at about 18:15 UTC.

Most of the drop came in the second half of 2025, long before any security problem. TVL was under $4 million by January 2026, and its highest point this year was $6.05 million, on 16 October.

Six public audit reports, all written before mainnet

Initia keeps its security reports in the initia-labs/audits repository on GitHub, with a table of which codebase each one covered. The dates below come from the file names.

Auditor	Date	Type	Code covered (repository README)
Zellic	18 Jun 2024	Private audit	Initia L1, MoveVM, MiniEVM
ChainLight	16 Oct 2024	Private audit	OPinit bots
OtterSec	20 Nov 2024	Private audit	Initia L1, MoveVM, OPinit module and bots, MiniEVM
Code4rena	21 Jan 2025	Audit competition	OPinit module and bots
Code4rena	24 Jan 2025	Audit competition	Initia L1, MoveVM, MiniMove, VIP module, usernames
Code4rena	24 Feb 2025	Audit competition	Initia L1, MiniEVM, MiniWasm

A Code4rena competition is not a private audit: independent researchers compete for rewards on a frozen codebase over a fixed period. The repository also holds a separate Zellic report on an iUSD vault, undated in the listing.

MoveVM was reviewed three times, by Zellic, by OtterSec and in a Code4rena contest. That does not settle anything about 23 October. The last report predates mainnet by two months and the halt by twenty, the initia-labs/movevm repository has published 13 releases since, and nobody has said which code path was abused or whether it existed when the auditors looked. Until that day DefiLlama listed no hack for Initia, and its entry still showed none at 18:15 UTC.

Security incident of 23 October 2026

The first public alarm came at 15:27 UTC from Spreek, an on-chain analyst, who wrote on X that the Initia chain was “hacked and a bunch of tokens infiniminted” and that $2.6 million had been cashed out so far. Fourteen minutes later, at 15:41:30 UTC, the chain stopped. Coindaro’s readings of a public node match: block 23,365,925 carries that stamp, and no block had followed it by 18:30 UTC.

Initia’s own notice went up on X at 16:00 UTC. It said the L1 and rollups had been halted at 15:41:30 UTC “due to a security incident” and that the team was working “to establish the full scope of any impact” with security teams, validators and exchanges. The rest of the post, as relayed by PANews and Phemex at 16:04 UTC, promised updates through verified channels only and warned against unofficial links and messages.

As of Oct 23, 2026, 3:41:30 PM UTC, the Initia L1 and Rollups have been halted due to a security incident.

Our team is actively investigating the situation and working to establish the full scope of any impact with security teams, validators, and exchanges.

We will share…

— Initia 🪢 (@initia) October 23, 2026

Upbit had already moved. The Korean exchange suspended INIT deposits and withdrawals in a notice posted at 15:57 UTC and added a trading caution at 16:15 UTC. PANews reported a suspension at Bithumb as well, which Coindaro has not confirmed on Bithumb’s pages.

The cause came from the co-founder. Zon said preliminary findings pointed to a previously unknown “Day 0” bug in the MoveVM implementation on the Cosmos SDK, according to The Block, which published at 17:03 UTC; Odaily had carried the same account earlier. The bug allowed unauthorised minting, he said, but “does not apply to native INIT tokens”. The Block quotes him on the size: “The attacker was able to mint and bridge out ~$2.7m worth of AUSD, ETH, and USDC before the chain was paused.”

Agora, which issues the AUSD stablecoin, spoke next. Phemex reported at 17:33 UTC that 1.4 million AUSD had left an Ethereum bridge adapter linked to Initia, and that Agora said a third-party product had been hit, not its own protocol, with no new AUSD minted. The Defiant added that Agora has no contracts on Initia and froze an AUSD account tied to the exploit, which had already swapped the 1.4 million AUSD for ETH. When the freeze happened was not reported.

One reading fits Zon’s statement. The chain’s supply query for INIT showed exactly 1 billion tokens at 18:19 UTC and again at 18:30 UTC. Coindaro did not check the supply of the other tokens on the chain, so the reading says nothing about what was minted elsewhere.

By about 18:35 UTC nothing new had come out. Initia had posted no post-mortem on its forum or blog, no security firm had published its own analysis, Upbit had not reopened transfers and no restart time had been given. These questions remain open:

• Which module or code path was abused, whether it sat in audited code and whether it has been patched.
• How much was minted and how much real value left: Spreek’s $2.6 million, Zon’s $2.7 million and Agora’s 1.4 million AUSD overlap in ways nobody has reconciled.
• Which rollups and which bridge adapter were involved, and which third-party product Agora meant.
• Whether funds can be frozen, recovered or repaid, and when, and from which block, the chain restarts.

Our news report on the Initia mint exploit has the minute-by-minute account and the exchange notices. Fake refund and “migration” pages tend to appear during halts, which is why Initia pointed users to its verified channels; its forum already carried a warning about scam accounts on X in March 2026. Our guide to avoiding crypto scams shows how to check a link before clicking it.

The risks around Initia after the halt

Time comes first. A stopped chain processes no transfers, and nobody outside the team knows when it will restart or whether governance will roll back any state. INIT held on an exchange depends on that exchange’s choices about deposits, withdrawals and trading.

Then there is where the bug sits. MoveVM is shared code, and one flaw in it was enough for Initia to stop the L1 and every rollup at once. When one company supplies the base chain, the rollup framework and the virtual machines, a bug in its code has nowhere else to stop.

The token schedule adds pressure. By the docs, the team, investors and Foundation hold 38% of supply between them and release it over four years from April 2025, and the date of the team and investor cliff is disputed. Half the supply goes to incentives, and the rollups that left in 2025 and 2026 show how far rewards alone can carry an app.

Validators are a question the sources only touch. A proposal to shrink the active validator set went up on the forum in October 2025; Coindaro did not read its content and cannot say what changed. Outsiders are exposed too, as Agora found out: bridges and stablecoin issuers on other chains were within reach of a bug inside Initia.

Initia next to Celestia and other rollup stacks

Initia does not compete with Celestia on data availability. It is a customer: rollups built on the Interwoven Stack post their transaction batches there. Celestia’s job ends at publishing and ordering data; execution, liquidity and incentives belong to the chains that use it.

Initia’s bet runs the other way. Its L1 wants to be where rollups settle, trade and get paid, with an exchange, a bridge swap and a reward program inside the base chain. The docs call the L1 a hub and router: tokens and messages between rollups pass through it, and so does the liquidity in InitiaDEX and Minitswap. That gives Initia control of the user’s path from one chain to another. It also puts the risk in one place, and with $5.73 million locked, the design has yet to attract the deposits it was built for.

The next date on the token calendar is 24 October 2026, when 2.5 million INIT are due to Echo buyers. Whether the chain is running by then is up to Initia.