Only in Crypto: Someone created $2m that didn’t exist. Seven minutes later, he had real money on another blockchain. Then the chain switched itself off, and its token INIT closed up 14%. This was Friday, on a blockchain called Initia. A flaw let an attacker mint 2 million units of a dollar stablecoin with no backing. In plain terms, a counterfeit. Then, the clever part. He destroyed them. Tokens move between blockchains by being destroyed on one side so the equivalent can be released on the other. The system on the receiving end checks that the tokens were burned. It does not check whether they were ever supposed to exist. So, if you prove that you shredded a cheque, you get paid out in cash. No one is asking whether the cheque was good. Elapsed time from the fake money appearing to the real money landing: 7 minutes, 21 seconds Initia halted its blockchain and every rollup running on it 42 minutes after the mint. Everything was already gone. The company behind the stablecoin froze the attacker’s address about 89 minutes after he’d sold. The token fell to $0.115 on the news, then finished the day up roughly 14%. A piece of financial infrastructure stopped working, with no cause published and no date for resuming, and the market’s response was to send the token upwards. Money that didn’t exist bought money that did. The chain stopped. The token went up.