Official Twitter (aka X) account A coin belonging to gaming giant Activision Blizzard, publisher of the Call of Duty and Diablo franchises, was exploited on Thursday night by Solana, which shared an apparently unaffiliated meme coin, making it the official token launcher. It was used to convey as if
A screenshot of the since-deleted tweet included an image of Activision-owned gaming icon Crash Bandicoot and claimed to be offering ATVI tokens generated by Solana Labs, the main development team on the Solana network. It also contains a URL pointing to a list of Solana meme coins that can be traded on decentralized exchanges.
ATVI tokens are available on Solana, but they don’t seem to have anything to do with Activision Blizzard or Solana Labs. Cryptographic tokens can be distributed by anyone on a decentralized network, and meme coins are often inspired by viral Internet images, public figures and companies, news events, and more.
The plan to pass on ATVI as an official Activision Blizzard token does not appear to have resulted in many casualties. The token has seen a total worth of $16,000 in just under 500 transactions, with its price down 99.9% after a brief pump late Thursday, according to data from DexScreener. As of this writing, the price is just a tiny penny.
“Thank you for your patience. @ATVI_AB I have regained control of my account. “We take security seriously and we plan to investigate what happened to prevent situations like this from happening in the future.” I tweeted this last night.
Activision declined to comment further. decryptionThis is GG beyond the tweeted statement. The company was acquired by tech giant and Xbox maker Microsoft last fall for about $69 billion after a year and a half of regulatory issues.
decryption‘s GG also reached out to Twitter for comment or additional details, but did not receive an immediate response.
Meme coins have flourished on Solana in recent months due to the network’s low fees. Solana-based meme coins such as Dogwifhat (WIF) and Bonk (BONK) are among the world’s most valuable cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, and recent Solana meme coin trends include misspellings of politicians’ names .
Edited by Stacey Elliott.