Projects rarely get a second chance to launch a new cryptocurrency. The first launch is everything. That’s when investors decide whether to trust or ignore the project. Whether it’s a technical failure or a serious security issue, one mistake can end your business forever. By that standard, Griffin AI (GAIN) should have been dead a long time ago.
On September 24, 2025, Griffin AI made the impossible possible. It was launched with phenomenal success. With support from six major exchanges including Binance Alpha, HTX, and KuCoin, the $GAIN token exploded upon its debut. It started trading at an opening price of $0.05 with a fully diluted valuation of $50 million, but grew over 400% to $2.24 within hours, reaching a peak valuation of $224 million. In the first 12 hours of this project, transaction volume exceeded $100 million.
This was a perfect launch for a project in AI DeFi agents, which by any standard is one of the most complex niches in the industry.
And what turned out to be a perfect launch turned into a perfect disaster. The exploit resulted in the minting of fake GAIN tokens, causing the token price to plummet. The project’s value plummeted from a high of $224 million to just $7 million, a massive 96% drop. For the community, this was a huge blow to their confidence. It seemed like just another project that failed and was left out of the broader market.
Now, let’s change the story. This is about hard lessons and a serious plan to bounce back. Griffin AI isn’t giving up. The team came back with a focus on being open, protecting users, and proving the simple point that the product itself was never the problem.
$220 million disaster overview
For weeks, the Griffin AI team remained silent about what exactly went wrong, leading to rumors and damaging community trust. However, in a recent update, the team finally explained what happened, and it turned out to be a simple human error with limited scope, rather than a major system failure.
Founder Oliver Feldmeyer said in an interview with BeInCrypto that the exploit was not a flaw in Griffin AI’s protocol or AI agent. The vulnerability was caused by “key compromise to the BNB bridge” and was temporarily handled by a single team of developers who “failed to implement appropriate security controls.”
The impact was immediate and decisive. “Immediately after the breach, the developer was immediately fired,” Feldmeier said, noting that the matter had been reported to police and a criminal investigation is expected.
Although this revelation provided a clear root cause, it did little to resolve the immediate financial and reputational damage. The team is now faced with an impossible choice. Either destroy the project and its community, or attempt full-fledged post-hack repair, one of the most difficult operations in cryptocurrencies.
Strategy to “protect users”
Griffin AI’s response has become a case study in crisis management. The team’s first and most important decision was to prioritize users over their own timelines and tokenomics. This resulted in a 1:1 token exchange designed to be complete for all affected users.
This was not an inflationary event. Unlike many projects that print diluted new tokens on paper to compensate for losses, Griffin AI’s maximum supply remains exactly 1,000,000,000 GAIN. Not a single new token was minted.
The team and its investors took the hit themselves. To fund the 1:1 restoration of users, the project reallocated tokens from its own internal bucket and proceeded to vest tokens originally intended for the team and investors. In short, the project’s backers sacrificed their locked-up assets for the sake of wholeizing the community, a move that preserves the economic integrity of the token.
This effort was powered by something rarely seen in cryptocurrencies. In a joint decision with Binance, the exchange stepped in to help, covering about half of the exchange tokens returned to users. It is extremely unusual for an exchange like Binance to bear collection costs. This action serves as a vote of confidence in the Griffin AI team and its future.
$2.5 million recovery program
Making the users whole was the first step. The next step is to rebuild market confidence.
To this end, Griffin AI has launched a $2.5 million recovery and repurchase program, with the first $1 million tranche already underway. The team says the program will perform open market buybacks and perform monthly token burns using a fully transparent on-chain public record that anyone can see.
In a report released after the incident, analysts explained that share buybacks were not a key part of the company’s restructuring plan. This marks the completion of the token exchange and helps stabilize the market by removing excess tokens from circulation, setting a stable foundation for rebuilding the project. This $2.5 million amount is also meaningful because it matches the total amount the attackers made by selling fake tokens.
The basics remain the same: products that work
This hack had no impact on the GriffinAI platform Agent Builder or its core product, which is still up and fully functional. Griffin AI’s flagship is Transaction Execution Agent (TEA) Turbo, a chat AI agent for DeFi that runs on both Ethereum and BNB chains. Branded as a “DeFi Dapps Killer,” users can use simple natural language commands to perform swaps, manage yield, and transfer assets without ever touching a DEX or wallet, with routing through major protocols such as Uniswap, 1inch, and Aave v3.
Before the incident, the platform already had around 250,000 active users. Additionally, the no-code Agent Builder has produced over 15,000 community-built agents, demonstrating the dedication of our developer base.
To create a direct demand driver for the beleaguered token, the team has also launched Griffin Premium, a new tier that unlocks exclusive agents and features for users who hold at least 100 GAIN.
Are there discounts hiding in plain sight?
A non-inflationary token swap, strong exchange support, an active product with users, and a well-funded buyback plan have created a large gap between Griffin AI’s price and its true value.
Currently, Griffin AI’s market value is between $7 million and $10 million, trading 86% below its launch price of $50 million and 96% below its peak. However, as analysts point out, the company remains the same founder, same team, same product and same exchange listing as before.
At the same time, similar AI and agent-based DeFi projects have valuations between $80 million and $300 million, which means that GAIN’s current price is much lower than its peers, and despite the successful execution of the token swap and Binance’s financial support, it is as if the project has already failed.
In short, the market is still reacting to the reputational damage caused by the hack and is missing out on the transparent and well-funded resurgence already underway.
The Griffin AI story is now about reinvention. The risks are real, as it will take time to regain trust in cryptocurrencies. But with a market buzzing with comeback stories, Griffin AI has made its move. The company has the product, the users, and a $2.5 million recovery fund to prove it’s here to stay.
