Aku ETH NFT Launch Ended With $34M Locked In Flawed Smart Contracts

Aku ETH NFT launch just ended with $34 million locked in flawed smart contracts due to mistakes in the code for the project launch meant that the coins are inaccessible so let’s read more today in our latest ethereum news today.

The Aku ETH NFT launch hit a snag when the bugs in the smart contract locked up $34 million worth of coins and the creators will issue refunds this week and will airdrop the NFTs to buyers using the new smart contract. The anticipated ETH NFT launch on Friday went awry when flaws in the project’s code locked away $34 million worth of coins which now cant be accessed by the creators of the NFT buyers. The launch was for Akutars which is a 3d avatar project and the latest release based on  Aku on the character created by former Major League Baseball player Micah Johnson the character is a young Black Boy that dreams of becoming an astronaut inspired by real-life questions posed by the Johnson nephew.

25 MINUTES!!

🚨 The Akutar Sale Begins at 4:30
PM EST 🚨

Drop Link 🔗: https://t.co/A4sK9YoNk9 pic.twitter.com/csGvhV23VB

— Aku :: Akutars (@AkuDreams) April 22, 2022

The Akutars project spans 15,000 ETH avatars with randomized traits with the owners of earlier NFTs granted a free avatar for every price they held. The remaining 5,500 avatars NFTs launched on Friday starting a 3.5 ETH with the price gradually decreasing. Once the lanch started, the Twitter user named Hasan warned of the issue with the smart contract and wrote that he was told by the Aku developers that were wrong and got assured that there were failsafes in the place to prevent the issue.

However, someone going under the name USER221 triggered the exploit that halted both ETH withdrawals and the refunds from the contract accoridng to the threat by ETH Developer 0xlnuarashi. After the exploit, there was a note urging the developers to please do bug bounty on the contracts or have them audited. The user sent the separate note attached to the ETH transaction, they wrote that they will unlock the proejct effectively:

“Well, this was fun, had no intention of the factually exploiting this lol. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have used Coinbase. Once you guys publicly acknowledge that the exploit exists, I will remove the block immediately.”

And the team cannot claim because totalBids is forever stuck at a number higher than refundProgress, due to bad increment math. pic.twitter.com/9pavQRd3g5

— foobar (@0xfoobar) April 23, 2022

The project started working again but then another bug popped up and the developers’ thread described a flaw in the developer’s smart contract code that failed to account for multiple NFTs mints in the same transaction and the contract requires the numbers to line up and enable withdrawals of any kind. The project tweeted:

“The exploit in the contract was not done out of malice; the person intended to bring attention to best practices for highly visible projects & novel mechanics. They unblocked the exploit quickly after we dug in and took ownership.”