There are new developments regarding an altcoin hack that took place in the past days. PeckShield confirmed on Thursday that a hacker who stole 20 million Optimism (OP) tokens transferred 1 million OPs to Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin. Also, the attacker handed over the 1 million OP voting rights to Yoav Weiss, a security expert and hacker at the Ethereum Foundation, as Vitalik transferred the altcoins to Weiss. However, Weiss stated that he was not the hacker himself but believed to be a white hat hacker. Here are the details…
Hacker sent altcoin to Vitalik Buterin
A hacker managed to steal 20 million OP management tokens from the wallet address of liquidity provider Wintermute. Instead of the L2 address, Wintermute provided an Ethereum (L1) multi-signature address that has not yet been deployed to Optimism (L2). Wintermute started to distribute the L1 multisig contract to the same address in L2, but the hacker managed to distribute the contract before the company and stole 20 million OP tokens.
Interestingly, the hacker did not use tokens to manipulate the Optimism administration, but instead sent 1 million OP tokens to Vitalik Buterin’s wallet address. Meanwhile, Yoav Weiss, announcing the attack, tweeted:
And the plot gets interesting. At the time of writing this explainer, the attacker authorized me to vote by throwing 1M OP: Thank you for authorizing Hint: no, I am not the attacker and I don’t know who it is. But now I’m guessing it’s a white hat.
Meanwhile, the Wintermute team called on the hacker to return the stolen Optimisim tokens . He also said they are ready to work with the hacker for consulting opportunities or other forms of collaboration in the future. The liquidity provider gave the white hat hacker a week to think. Otherwise, Wintermute said it will return the money and track down the hackers.
OP price drops
Prices of Ethereum scaling solution Optimism have dropped more than 10% in the last 24 hours to an all-time low of $0.7142. The coin gained popularity with its listing on major cryptocurrency exchanges such as Binance. As we reported as Kriptokoin.com, OP token prices, which were already underperforming after an unsuccessful listing, took another hit after the hack. At the time of writing, the OP price has somewhat compensated for the loss. It is currently changing hands at $0.90. Wintermute hopes this is an innocent attack as the attacker only sold 1 million OP tokens and the attacker still has 19 million OP tokens.
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