Exploiter Returns 17 Million Stolen Optimism Tokens

The hacker that stole 20 million OP tokens from Optimism has now returned the overwhelming majority of his ill-begotten funds. Public blockchain information exhibits that he’s made 17 transfers of 1 million OP every to the Optimism contract deal with.

• According to Etherscan, all 17 transfers of OP have been made in brief order. The first was at 12:09 pm UTC, with the final at 12:31 pm UTC on Friday.
• The returned funds don’t symbolize all tokens that the attacker stole, nonetheless. He continues to be 3 million OP in need of the 20 million he nabbed throughout Optimism’s failed transaction to (*17*).
• (*17*) – a cryptocurrency market maker – was supposed to offer liquidity provisioning providers for the newly airdropped OP token. The token offers participation rights to members of the layer 2 protocol’s two-tier governance structure.
• However, a complication occurred through which Optimism despatched the funds from its layer-2 deal with to (*17*)’s layer 1 deal with. This led to the funds being locked away from both social gathering.
• An opportunistic attacker stole the cash shortly after and offered off about 1 million tokens in brief order. Interestingly, he then despatched about 1 million tokens to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and delegated voting rights for these tokens to Yoav Weiss of the Ethereum Foundation.
• The subsequent day, the nameless thief despatched one other 1 million OP to Vitalik and provided the developer his respect. He then requested for recommendation on what to do with the tokens, feeling sorry in regards to the theft.
• He claimed to solely have 18 million tokens remaining which he may return. So far he’s returned 17 million, with 1 million nonetheless on his deal with balance.