Hacker returned 17 million OP tokens to the Optimism Foundation

What’s new? The hacker has returned 17 million OP tokens ($15,7 million at June 10 exchange rates) to Optimism developers as a result of the crypto wallet exploit. The hacker sent another 1 million stolen coins to an address allegedly belonging to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. The hacker suggested that he make a reverse transfer and thus confirm the address ownership, undertaking after that to return the remaining assets to the Optimism project.

Material from The Block

How did the events develop? Earlier, the Optimism Foundation had transferred 20 million tokens to an address that the project's partner, market maker Wintermute, did not have access to, which resulted in the funds being stolen. Wintermute demanded the funds back, guaranteeing no legal consequences, but the hacker transferred another 1 million coins to Buterin's alleged wallet, accompanying it with a message:

“...help to verify the return address and I will return the remaining after you. And hello Wintermute, sorry, I only have 18M and this is what I can return.”

Details of the hack. The Optimism Foundation sent Wintermute the funds as a grant as part of a liquidity services agreement. However, Wintermute provided the address of a multisignature wallet on the Ethereum Layer 1 (L1) network, which had not yet been deployed to Optimism's Layer 2 (L2) network. The hacker managed to deploy an L2 wallet with different parameters and take possession of the transferred tokens.

On May 31, OKX, LBank and MEXC exchanges announced the listing of the OP token. Early users of the network will be able to participate in the airdrop of 5% of the total token offering in the second quarter of 2022. A total of 214 million OP will be allocated to 248,000 addresses.

As of June 10 at 3:30 UTC, the OP token is trading at $0,924, having added 11,93% in 24 hours, according to Binance.

On June 1, analysts from PeckShield discovered dozens of fake Optimism tokens created by scammers on BNB Chain and Ethereum. Experts recorded the appearance of fake assets using the honeypot mechanism.