Fantom Foundation pays analyst $1,7 million for discovering the vulnerability

The compromise of the foundation’s wallet could have resulted in a loss of $170 million

21.11.2023 - 15:20

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What’s new? The Fantom Foundation, a non-profit organization, has awarded an anonymous blockchain analyst $1,7 million for discovering a vulnerability that could have caused the project $170 million in damages. The anonymous researcher identified additional potential risks to the blockchain by analyzing the $550 000 hack of the foundation’s wallets on November 17.

Press release

What else is known? On November 17, the non-profit lost 1% of its funds in a hacking attack on its wallets. The company subsequently transferred ownership of some of these wallets to an employee. Later, an independent anonymous analyst found out that one of the compromised wallets owned the contract address for issuing native tokens FTM based on the ERC20 standard.

Had an attacker gained access to the contract, they could have issued a large volume of FTM tokens for themselves on the Ethereum blockchain, but thanks to the analyst, the vulnerability was fixed in time.

“By addressing these weaknesses before they’re exploited maliciously, we ensure a secure platform for both developers and users. As such, the Foundation remains committed to rewarding those who bring network vulnerabilities to the team’s attention,” the press release says.

Launched in late 2019, the Fantom blockchain protocol enables the creation and deployment of decentralized applications (DApps). In July this year, the project lost another $126 million in cryptocurrencies in an attack on Multichain’s bridge for moving assets between networks. As a result of the incident, Multichain ceased operations.

As of November 21, FTM ranks 60th in the cryptocurrency ranking with a capitalization of $853,52 million and is trading at $0,3047 on Binance, having lost 8,16% overnight. The weekly drop, according to aggregator CoinGecko, amounted to 2,4%.

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