Why This Hacker Sent 1M Optimism Tokens To Vitalik Buterin

The inventor of Ethereum Vitalik Buterin was the unintended recipient of 1 million OP tokens from this community’s scalability answer Optimism. The crew behind this challenge addressed issues a couple of potential exploit associated to the launch of their governance token.

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As clarified by Optimism, they entered a cope with liquidity supplier Wintermute to “facilitate a smoother expertise for customers” seeking to purchase OP and take part within the challenge’s governance mannequin. As a part of the settlement, Optimism despatched 20 million OP tokens to a multi-signature tackle.

Nonetheless, the liquidity supplier was unable to entry the funds because it found the tackle was designed as an Ethereum layer-1 multi-sig with out an Optimism, which operates as a second layer answer, good contract deployment. About this, the liquidity supplier stated:

As we communicated the pockets tackle to the Optimism crew, we made a severe error.

The Optimism partnered started a “restoration operation” to realize entry to the funds, as they concluded with Wintermute that the funds “had been probably retrievable and that no person apart from Wintermute might get better these funds”, the liquidity supplier stated in a statement.

The restoration operation was scheduled, the liquidity supplier clarified, for June 7^th, 2022, however a hacker beat them to it. The crew behind the Ethereum second layer answer defined:

Sadly, an attacker was in a position to deploy the multisig to L2 with totally different initialization parameters earlier than these efforts had been accomplished, assuming possession of the 20m OP.

Moreover, Optimism claims the attacker started promoting the stolen funds. As a lot as 1 million OP tokens have been “dumped” into the market from the hacker’s tackle: 0x4f3a120E72C76c22ae802D129F599BFDbc31cb81.

On the time of writing, this tackle nonetheless holds 18 million OP tokens or $14 million with an extra $3 in USD Coin (USDC). Nonetheless, new developments made the entire incident weirder.

Why Despatched Half Of The Funds To Vitalik Buterin?

Developer Yoav Weiss, Safety Fellow on the Ethereum Basis, provided different particulars concerning the latest occasions. He believes the attacker may very well be a Whitehat hacker.

He based mostly this presumption on the truth that the attacker waited 4 days earlier than taking possession of the OP funds. Throughout that point, there was a threat that Wintermute might need deployed the answer to get better the funds.

As well as, the attacker hasn’t moved the funds, as Optimism believed. In step, the inventor of Ethereum Vitalik Buterin acquired 1 million tokens and Weiss himself acquired one other 1 million OP.

And the plot thickens. As I used to be scripting this explainer, the attacker delegated the 1M OP voting energy to *me*: https://t.co/75VPmS91J5

Thanks for delegating 🙂

Trace: no, I am not the attacker and I do not know who’s. However now guessing it is a whitehat.

— yoav.eth (@yoavw) June 9, 2022

Tasks usually ship Vitalik Buterin tokens to have a good time the launch of their platforms, or to “burn them”, because the inventor of Ethereum hardly ever makes use of them. The truth that Weiss is a safety fellow appears to be a part of a message from the attacker.

The crew behind Optimism claims the hacker has not used the funds for any exercise associated to its governance mannequin. If this example adjustments, they declare further measures might be taken alongside the OP neighborhood.

Different measures can be found, however the Optimism crew refuses to implement them and jeopardizes the challenge’s imaginative and prescient of a permissionless community. They concluded:

(…) incidents like this are the rising pains of an evolving business. It is a reminder to everybody coping with contracts throughout totally different chains that the safety assumptions of 1 chain don’t essentially carry over to a different.

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On the time of writing, OP’s value trades at $0.8 with a 16% loss within the final 24-hours.