The inventor of Ethereum Vitalik Buterin was the unintended recipient of 1 million OP tokens from this network’s scalability solution Optimism. Team behind the project addressedConcerns about potential exploits related to their launch of the governance token.
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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. Optimism also sent 20 million OP tokens as part of this agreement to a multisignature address.
The liquidity provider could not access the funds because it found that the address was an Ethereum layer-1 multisig without an optimism. This works as a smart contract deployment second layer solution. The liquidity provider provided the following information:
We made a grave error when we sent the wallet address to Optimism.
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.
According to the liquidity provider clarification, the operation of recovery was planned for June 7,ThHowever, a hacker beat them to the feat. Explained by the team that created Ethereum’s second layer solution:
An attacker, however, was able deploy the multisigto L2 with various initialization parameters prior to these efforts being completed. He assumed ownership of the 20m OP.
Optimism asserts that the attacker started selling stolen funds. As much as 1 million OP tokens have been “dumped” into the market from the hacker’s address: 0x4f3a120E72C76c22ae802D129F599BFDbc31cb81.
This address holds 18,000,000 OP tokens, or $14 Million with $3 USD Coin (USDC) at the time this article was written. New developments have made this incident even more bizarre.
What’s the point of donating a portion of the funds to Vitalik Buterin instead?
Yoav Weiss is a developer and Security Fellow at Ethereum Foundation. providedAdditional details are available about recent events. According to him, the attacker might be a Whitehat Hacker.
The attacker waited only four days before he took control of the OP money. There was also the possibility that Wintermute could have used the solution to retrieve the funds during that period.
In addition, the attacker hasn’t moved the funds, as Optimism believed. Weiss received an additional 1,000,000 OP, while Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum, received 1 million tokens.
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 the attacker. And I don’t even know who. Now, I’m guessing that it is 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. Weiss’s status as security specialist seems part of an attack message.
Optimism says the hacker is not using the funds for activities that are related to its governance model. They say that if the situation is not changed, then additional measures will be taken with 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 reached this conclusion:
(…) incidents like this are the growing pains of an evolving industry. Everyone who deals with contracts across multiple chains should be reminded that security assumptions made by one chain don’t necessarily apply to the next.
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At the time of writing, OP’s price trades at $0.8 with a 16% loss in the last 24-hours.
