Over 20 million tokens were stolen from the Optimism Foundation after a botched transaction from liquidity providers.
- Optimism is a Layer 2 solution for Ethereum which launched its Optimism Token ($OP) on June 1st. Wintermute acted as liquidity providers for the launch, but the tokens were lost in transport through an error in the addresses provided.
- Optimism disclosed that a hacker had managed to take advantage of the botched transaction and take the 20 million tokens for himself. Wintermute CEO Evgeny Gaevoy gave the hacker an ultimatum and 1 week to follow through or he would involve authorities. The hacker returned the funds a day later.
- The hacker had sent a message along with 1,000,000 OP tokens to Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, stating “Hello, Vitalik, I believe in you, just want to know your opinion on this. BTW, help to verify the return address and I will return the remaining after you. And hello Wintermute, sorry, I only have 18M and this is what I can return. Stay Optimistic!”
- The hacker started depositing the tokens hours later in batches of 1,000,000 OP tokens to the original address. So far 17,000,000 tokens have been deposited by the exploiter, 1,000,000 is being recovered from Buterins wallet and the remaining 2,000,000 tokens are being kept by the hacker as his bounty.
See Related: Osmosis DEX Halted After $5M Exploit
