The Sandbox Faces ‘Infinite Mint’ Claim After More Than 500 Million SAND Minted on Base
Forecast Trend Report by Period
Signs of abnormal large-scale issuance have emerged involving The Sandbox’s SAND token. Industry participants have alleged that a specific address obtained minting authority on the Base network and minted more than 500 million additional tokens.
As of Aug. 21, a large mint had been detected in the SAND smart contract on Base, according to industry participants. The initially identified amount alone was reported to exceed 500 million tokens.
SAND has a maximum supply of 3 billion tokens. If 500 million tokens were in fact newly minted, that would amount to about 16.7% of the token’s maximum supply. An “infinite mint attack” exploits weaknesses in a smart contract’s permission controls or issuance structure, allowing an attacker to create tokens arbitrarily. If the newly minted supply enters circulation, it could dilute the value of existing tokens and trigger heavy selling pressure.
The contract identified as the site of the incident was a SAND smart contract deployed on Base, Ethereum’s layer-2 network. The Sandbox has expanded SAND beyond Ethereum and Polygon to Base and BNB Chain to reduce transaction costs and broaden access.
The exact scale of the issuance and the cause of the attack have not been confirmed. It is also unclear whether the newly minted tokens were actually sold or can be transferred to other networks. So far, the abnormal activity has been reported only on Base.
SAND’s price has yet to show a clear impact. On Binance’s Tether market, the token was trading around $0.051 on Aug. 21, up 13% from a day earlier. That may reflect the fact that the movement of the newly minted tokens has not been identified and that liquidity in Base-based markets accounts for only a small share of overall trading volume.
