BlocksInform
The hacker who stole 20 million op tokens to optimism has now returned the vast majority of his ill-begotten funds. Public data from blockchain shows that it has done 17 transfers of 1 million op each to the optimistic contract address.
- According to Etherscan, all 17 transfers of OP were made in short order. The first one was 12:09 UTC and the last one was 12:31 UTC on Friday.
- However, the returned funds do not represent all chips stolen by the attacker. He is still 3 million OP short of the 20 million he nabbed during Optimism’s failed transaction to Wintermute.
- Wintermute, a cryptocurrency market specialist, was supposedly providing liquidity provisioning services for the recently released transaction token. The token provides participation rights to members of the Tier 2 two-level governance structure.
- However, a complication occurred when optimism sent the funds from its layer 2 address to Wintermute's layer 1 address. This led to the freezing of funds from either party.
- An opportunistic attacker stole the coins shortly after and sold about 1 million tokens in a short time. Interestingly, he then sent about 1 million tokens to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and delegated voting rights for those tokens to Yoav Weiss of the Ethereum Foundation.
- The following day, the anonymous robber sent another 1 million op to vitalik and offered the developer his respect. He then asked for advice on what to do with the tokens, feeling sorry about the theft.
- He said he had just 18 million chips left to return. So far he’s returned 17 million, with 1 million still on his address balance.
