Bitquery: Initia USDC Bridge Reserve Fell to $63 as Withdrawals Failed
By Crypto Wire
October 25, 2026
The Initia mint-to-bridge chapter has a clearer settlement ledger. A Bitquery investigation — with on-chain figures verified October 23, 2026 and amplified in a Sunday CryptoSlate wrap — says one Initia account printed about $7.48 million in unbacked tokens at face value in 13 seconds, while bridge reserves paid out about $2.73 million in real coins on Ethereum. That is the Stablecoin Settlement desk’s new fact versus the prior Rug Room halt chapter (LN 11053) and the TokenPost timing update (LN 11124): not another headline on the MoveVM bug alone, but who paid and what emptied.
Noble’s USDC reserve backing Initia-side USDC is the sharpest print. Bitquery puts that reserve at about $1.09 million just before the attacker’s first cash-out, then at an intraday low of $63 by 15:37 UTC on October 23 — a 99.99% drawdown in roughly 36 minutes. A later check at 18:52 UTC the same day showed about $24,000 still sitting behind roughly 1.08 million Initia-side USDC copies at face value. Before the halt, Bitquery counted 55 failed ordinary USDC withdrawal attempts, most from one bot resending the same balance under about $21,000. Larger attacker USDC asks also bounced with Noble’s “insufficient funds” errors after earlier payouts of about $1 million at 15:02 UTC and $80,000 at 15:24 UTC.
The rails matter as much as the theft total. Bitquery maps Initia USDC through Noble and Circle’s CCTP, while AUSD0 and WETH copies cash out through LayerZero adapters on Ethereum. The firm says the Ethereum ether adapter lost about 96% of its coins and the AUSD adapter about 71%, with Agora stating its issuer AUSD contract was never deployed on Initia — the hit sat on a third-party bridged product. Everything that cleared was swapped into about 1,135.5 ETH and parked in a fresh wallet five seconds after Initia’s 15:41:30 UTC halt; Bitquery’s 18:52 UTC read still showed that pile unmoved. Face-value unauthorized balances (~$7.48 million) and real reserve payouts (~$2.73 million) are not the same number — keep them separate when desks quote “the Initia loss.”
Do not collapse a drained bridge reserve into a Circle issuer solvency claim. Circle’s own bridged-versus-native framing — echoed in the CryptoSlate wrap — means a near-empty Noble corridor can block Initia exits without proving Circle’s dollar backing failed issuer-wide. For collectors and desks holding Initia-side USDC copies, Bitquery’s settlement point is blunt: those copies are worth what the reserve can still pay, and that reserve was near empty at the low. Initia’s October 24 update still attributed the flaw to a MoveVM script-caching bug, said no native INIT was minted, and expected a patched, audited fix within days while L1 and rollups stayed halted — without a firm restart date or reimbursement schedule in that note.
Bitquery also separates what never left. Roughly $4.55 million in face-value fake tokens remained on Initia at the halt, mostly unbacked iUSD that could not clear a bridge, plus about $1.55 million in USDC/AUSD/ether copies that bounced, stalled, or were never sent. A late AUSD LayerZero message lacked LayerZero Labs’ own checker signature and was blocked on the Ethereum adapter at 17:51 UTC — useful plumbing color, not a recovery promise. Across Base, Arbitrum, BNB Chain, Optimism, and Polygon, Bitquery found zero LayerZero deliveries from Initia since October 22, so the Sunday settlement story stays Ethereum-plus-Noble rather than a multi-L2 contagion print.
This chapter stays unused versus 11053 and 11124 because the Bitquery reserve ledger and failed-withdrawal count were not the lead facts in those posts. Prefer this Stablecoin Settlement angle over another GameFi floor tick or a thin ASCII Dogs “mint soon” culture tease from the same Pit Report window. The next hard facts to wait for are Initia’s post-mortem, any refill of Noble’s USDC reserve, and whether the 1,135.5 ETH consolidation wallet moves.
Settlement watch: Watch whether Noble’s Initia USDC reserve is refilled above the ~$24,000 post-attack print before any restart, whether Initia publishes a reimbursed path for stranded USDC/WETH/AUSD0 copies, and whether wallet 0x358ef0130f7a5aa516dcd81bdc80b18cde41cac8 moves the parked 1,135.5 ETH.
Bottom line: Bitquery says Noble’s USDC reserve backing Initia fell from about $1.09 million to $63 as 55 ordinary withdrawals failed, while bridge reserves paid about $2.73 million against roughly $7.48 million in unbacked face-value prints.
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