An infinite mint assault happens when an undesirable entity or hacker mints an abnormally large number of tokens within a protocol, increasing its supply to an unhealthy level and devaluing each token. Typically, the process is quick, with attackers taking home millions of dollars in tokens. Attackers frequently dump all minted tokens on the market, causing the price to plummet.

Blockchain systems are particularly vulnerable to this type of attack due to security flaws that allow hackers to exploit bugs and other code weaknesses. Hackers used shield mining contracts in the Cover system attack to obtain unauthorised crypto rewards from the system. The hacker was able to steal 40 quintillion tokens from the Cover staking pool, leading the token price to drop by 97%. In this case, the attacker sold about 11,700 coins via 1inch and took around $5 million in tokens.