Why This Hacker Sent 1M Optimism Tokens To Vitalik Buterin
09 Juin 2022 - 08:00PM
NEWSBTC
The inventor of Ethereum Vitalik Buterin was the unintended
recipient of 1 million OP tokens from this network’s scalability
solution Optimism. The team behind this project addressed concerns
about a potential exploit related to the launch of their governance
token. Related Reading | TA: Bitcoin Stuck In Key Range, Why A
Major Breakout Is Possible As clarified by Optimism, they entered a
deal with liquidity provider Wintermute to “facilitate a smoother
experience for users” looking to buy OP and participate in the
project’s governance model. As part of the agreement, Optimism sent
20 million OP tokens to a multi-signature address. However, the
liquidity provider was unable to access the funds as it discovered
the address was designed as an Ethereum layer-1 multi-sig without
an Optimism, which operates as a second layer solution, smart
contract deployment. About this, the liquidity provider said: As we
communicated the wallet address to the Optimism team, we made a
serious error. The Optimism partnered began a “recovery operation”
to gain access to the funds, as they concluded with Wintermute that
the funds “were potentially retrievable and that nobody other than
Wintermute could recover those funds”, the liquidity provider said
in a statement. The recovery operation was scheduled, the liquidity
provider clarified, for June 7th, 2022, but a hacker beat them to
it. The team behind the Ethereum second layer solution explained:
Unfortunately, an attacker was able to deploy the multisig to L2
with different initialization parameters before these efforts were
completed, assuming ownership of the 20m OP. Furthermore, Optimism
claims the attacker began selling the stolen funds. As much as 1
million OP tokens have been “dumped” into the market from the
hacker’s address: 0x4f3a120E72C76c22ae802D129F599BFDbc31cb81. At
the time of writing, this address still holds 18 million OP tokens
or $14 million with an additional $3 in USD Coin (USDC). However,
new developments made the whole incident weirder. Why Sent Part Of
The Funds To Vitalik Buterin? Developer Yoav Weiss, Security Fellow
at the Ethereum Foundation, provided other details about the recent
events. He believes the attacker could be a Whitehat hacker. He
based this presumption on the fact that the attacker waited four
days before taking ownership of the OP funds. During that time,
there was a risk that Wintermute might have deployed the solution
to recover the funds. In addition, the attacker hasn’t moved the
funds, as Optimism believed. In step, the inventor of Ethereum
Vitalik Buterin received 1 million tokens and Weiss himself
received another 1 million OP. And the plot thickens. As I was
writing this explainer, the attacker delegated the 1M OP voting
power to *me*: https://t.co/75VPmS91J5 Thank you for delegating 🙂
Hint: no, I'm not the attacker and I don't know who is. But now
guessing it's a whitehat. — yoav.eth (@yoavw) June 9, 2022 Projects
often send Vitalik Buterin tokens to celebrate the launch of their
platforms, or to “burn them”, as the inventor of Ethereum rarely
uses them. The fact that Weiss is a security fellow seems to be
part of a message from the attacker. The team behind Optimism
claims the hacker has not used the funds for any activity related
to its governance model. If this situation changes, they claim
additional measures will be taken alongside the OP community. Other
measures are available, but the Optimism team refuses to enforce
them and jeopardizes the project’s vision of a permissionless
network. They concluded: (…) incidents like this are the growing
pains of an evolving industry. This is a reminder to everyone
dealing with contracts across different chains that the security
assumptions of one chain do not necessarily carry over to another.
Related Reading | Chainlink Price Surges As The Team Releases
New Staking Roadmap At the time of writing, OP’s price trades at
$0.8 with a 16% loss in the last 24-hours.
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