Ethereum Gas Exploit via Minting Attack Using XEN

In principle, the attacker could have employed any other token that permits gas-heavy minting activities on Ethereum. The choice of XEN was due to its ability to be minted by anyone through payment of gas fees, which makes the minting process particularly gas-consuming. Since FTX was unintentionally covering the gas costs for withdrawals directed to smart contracts, the attacker took advantage of this by minting XEN at FTX's cost. This type of exploit could have been executed with other tokens sharing similar characteristics.