Crypto companies collaborate to take down a hacker
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Number of the day: A $400M ETH wallet
Crypto companies collaborate to take down a hacker
Meme of the day
NUMBER OF THE DAY
$400M = the return that the unknown owner of one of the most mysterious crypto wallets has generated to date.
Conor Rogan, a director at Coinbase, tweeted the blockchain information related to the address that purchased $75,000 in ETH in 2014 during the company's initial coin offering (ICO). Since then, they have not moved anything inside or outside.
Those holdings are now worth more than $400M. That’s a 5,333X return.
The holder also swept up ~$6.5M in ETH classic tokens after the 2016 hard fork (that’s an 87X return right there).
Either:
The owner is the best HODLer this side of the Mississippi OR
They lost their private key. Womp womp
Really hoping it’s option A.
Crypto companies collaborate to take down a hacker
Last week saw one of the craziest events in cryptocurrency. It features a court order, hackers being compromised, and a scam that helped recover hundreds of millions of dollars in stolen money.
Ladies & gents, get ya popcorn ready…. This is how Jump Crypto & Oasis teamed up to steal back $225M from the Wormhole hacker.
One year ago, Wormhole (a token bridge) got hacked for $325M+. The funds have moved a few times and most recently sat in an Oasis crypto wallet
Earlier this month, the High Court of England and Wales ordered Oasis to “take all necessary steps” to recover the stolen assets
Oasis teamed up with Jump Crypto (Wormhole’s parent company) and a group of white hat hackers to plan it out. The white hat (aka ethical) hackers pointed out that Oasis could upgrade its smart contract and exploit it through a vulnerability.
Oasis made the suggested upgrade and successfully recovered $225M in stolen funds. TLDR - the upgrade “tricked” the smart contract into transferring the stolen funds to a new wallet controlled by Jump.
Basically, a crypto company hacked itself in order to steal funds back from another hacker. Crazy, right? All that’s missing is Tom Cruise.
Yet, while some praised the clandestine operation, others emphasised how this could be detrimental to cryptocurrency. How "decentralised" some of these DeFi protocols really are is called into question if all it takes is a court order to make modifications and change smart contracts in order to withdraw money from an account.
While the Wormhole hack undoubtedly hurt DeFi, this counter-exploit has the potential to be even more detrimental by creating a new standard. And it sparked a heated discussion on Twitter.