Yesterday we wrote how 1 million stolen Optimism (OP) tokens ended up in the hands of Ethereum (ETH) founder Vitalik Buterin after a hacker stole 20 million. A large part of the stolen OP tokens are now also back with their rightful owner.
crypto bullying
Data from Etherscan indicates 17 transactions of 1 million OP tokens each between 2 AM yesterday morning and 12:30 AM yesterday afternoon. The destination address is the address of the Optimism organization. But the hacker actually had 18 million tokens left.
In a thread on twitter describes that Optimism indeed has 17 million tokens back, and Wintermute appears to want to pay the Optimism Foundation back the 2 million OP coins. The remaining two million remain from the hacker as compensation. Optimism and Wintermute are willing to see the hack as a ‘white hat hack’a kind of learning moment for the company.
Hey folks—in the interest of transparency (😉,😅), the address has returned a majority of the OP, and @wintermute_t has committed to reimbursing the Optimism Foundation for the remaining 2mm OP, which was kept as a bounty.https://t.co/jtElgPdNPk
— Optimism (✨🔴_🔴✨) (@optimismPBC) June 10, 2022
The name ‘Optimism’ is very funny in this context. the attacker is literally hacking the optimism surrounding OP. Well, he did achieve his goal. He advises Optimism in a on chain message, which was linked to the transaction, to remain optimistic.
The hack took place after a airdropwhich has also become somewhat controversial. OP was dumped en masse immediately after the airdrop. In a vote, tokenholders decided that merchants would be banned from future airdrops.
Crypto hacks the order of the day
After the bull market of the past few years, hackers are more active than ever. We regularly write about all kinds of thefts from the crypto world. For example, a hack earlier this year cost a DeFi protocol millions.
Vulnerabilities can be in a small corner. For example, some digital telephone keypads may private key predict your wallet with word prediction. In fact, early this month, we learned that the now-collapsed Terra ecosystem was the victim of a hack last year. It went undetected for seven months. So a hack as noisy as Optimism’s is relatively positive.