On June 8, the Ethereum Layer-2 solution “Optimism” reported that a wallet containing 20 million OP tokens has been hijacked by the hacker. Optimism was supposed to send these tokens to the addresses of Wintermute, a liquidity provider partner. However, wallet addresses provided by Wintermute do not yet support Optimism, causing these tokens to be frozen.
An anonymous hacker somehow discovered this transfer error and swiped all 20 million tokens. The hacker then sold off one million of the OP tokens for ETH and sent 1 million OPs to Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin’s wallet. The other 18 million OP tokens remain in the hacker’s wallet.
Optimism and Wintermute later revealed the hack, and took responsibility for their mistake to the community. Wintermute said that they will spend their own money to buy back OP tokens sold off by the hacker, and call for the attacker to return the funds before revealing their identity and pursuing them in court.
On the afternoon of June 10, the hacker continued to send another 1 million OP tokens to Vitalik Buterin’s wallet with the message:
“Hello, Vitalik, I believe in you, just want to know your opinion on this. BTW, 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. Stay Optimistic!”
The attacker then sent all 17M to Optimism’s address. At the time of writing, Optimism and Wintermute have not made an official statement about the latest moves of the hacker. The OP price at one point recovered 11% because of the news that the hacker would return stolen tokens.
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