Woofun AI reports that Axelar Network has issued a formal statement addressing community misconceptions regarding the recent security incident on Secret Network. The protocol explicitly clarified that neither Axelar nor the Inter-Blockchain Communication Protocol (IBC) was targeted or compromised. The vulnerable smart contract involved in the exploit was not developed, deployed, or maintained by Axelar.

Furthermore, Axelar's integrated firewall mechanism successfully prevented the incident from propagating to other connected chains.

The exploited contract was identified as a fork of the CW20-ICS20 implementation. Developers of this specific fork removed two core security checks, thereby introducing an 'infinite mint' vulnerability. By deleting verification mechanisms originally designed to prevent such exploits, the fork altered the contract's trust model without undergoing a new security audit. While anyone can deploy contracts via IBC to wrap cross-chain assets, this incident resulted from modifications to a third-party contract rather than an inherent flaw in the IBC protocol itself.