According to a report released by Messari, a research company located in the New York, Stellar or XLM was affected by a glitch in the software which had led to 2.25 billion extra stellar tokens (XLM) to be printed in 2017 which valued at almost $10 million dollars at that particular time).
According to the report, the Stellar platform had faced an inflation bug in April 2017. The research firm told that they were always inspecting the supply of the top 50 cryptocurrencies according to market capitalization and while inspecting, they came to know about the inflation bug which was there in the software code of Stellar and was exploited by a hacker back in 2017.
No public announcement made by the Stellar team:
According to the researchers, the Stellar Development Foundation or SDF did not publically disclose the bug or the printing of the extra 2.5 million XLM tokens. The inflation bug was inside the “MergeOPFrame::doApply” function of the Stellar protocol due to which the total supply of XLM was increased by almost 25% back then.
The Stellar Development Foundation, on the other hand, had burnt the same amount of XLM tokens from the community reserve in order to counterbalance the inflation. Thus, the news agencies and other researchers were not able to notice the significant change in the supply.
What happened with the extra XLM?
It is not exactly known what happened with the extra printed 2.5 billion XLM tokens, the research firm is considering that the tokens were most probably transferred to a crypto exchange and sold during the bull market of 2017.
Response from Stellar Development Foundation:
The Stellar Development foundation reacted to the claims being made by Messari, stating that Stellar was a developing open source project that had a small dedicated team of developers. Therefore, the announcement of the inflation bug in their released notes made sense. SDF team stated that they had mentioned it twice in the release notes of the project and made it quite clear that the bug was exploited. Then, the team burnt the same amount of XLM tokens to balance the supply.
The SDF team also said that since then, there has not been any bug reported in the software, and if there was any bug, the team would be disclosing it in proper detailing as soon as it was mended. They added that they had also made an announcement a few weeks back in their roadmap of 2019 that they are already performing the total accounting of all XLM tokens by the year-end and the detailing around the inflation bug was and is going to be a portion of the same.
