Optimism Hacker Returned 17M Tokens After Recent Theft

The Optimism hacker returned 17 million tokens after sending 1 million tokens to Vitalik Buterin so let’s read more today in our latest cryptocurrency news.

The Optimism airdrop was filled with errors but now it seems to have a happy ending. The Optimism hacker returned 17 million tokens that were stolen last week. These tokens were meant to be used as governance for the company’s DAO, the Optimism Collective DAO which granted voting privileges to people that hold its governance token.

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

Etherscan data shows that the OP was sent back in 17 separate 1 million token transactions on Friday and the hacker exchanged 1 million OP for ETH and sent another 1 million to the ETH founder Vitalik Buterin who still has it in his wallet. The Optimism Foundation called the 2 million OP that hasn’t been returned a bounty and that it was in the process of recovering the rest of the tokens sent to Buterin. Optimism is known as an Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution which means that its transactions bypass the Ethereum mainnet but in order to work properly, the layer-2 optimism wallet address has to be synced with the Ethereum 1 addresses.

After announcing the launch of the native OP Token, the company sent 20 million tokens to the wrong blockchain address which resulted in the 20 million tokens being stolen. Optimism hired the crypto market maker Witnermute to distribute the tokens but because Optimism sent them to the Layer 1 address, it hadn’t been synced to Layer 2 they were inaccessible. Wintermute said that the tokens will be secure but in a day, the hacker stole all 20 million and they were worth $35 million at the time. Wintermute wrote:

“There is hope that it is a whitehat exploit, in which case the remaining funds are potentially recoverable. However, we are currently operating under the premise that it is not the case since we haven’t received any communication from them and our message on the chain was left unanswered.”

When the tokens were returned to Optimism, OP was trading at $0.92 and the tokens were worth $15.6 million.

As recently reported, The Ethereum Layer-2 scaling solution Optimism hacker sent 1 million tokens to the Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin while he stole another 19 million after the launch partner Wintermute transferred the tokens to the wrong account. The hacker now made their next move and sent a million of the stolen tokens to Buterin’s wallet.