Is Vitalik Buterin Behind The Recent $16 Mln Optimism (OP) Hack?

A hacker who stole 20 million Optimism (OP) tokens, has transferred 1 million OP to Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, PeckShield confirmed on Thursday. Moreover, the attacker delegated the 1 million OP voting right to Yoav Weiss, a security expert and hacker at Ethereum Foundation, as Vitalik had delegated airdrop to Weiss. However, Weiss has stated that he is not the attacker but believes it’s whitehat.

Hacker Sends 1 Million OP Tokens to Vitalik Buterin

A hacker managed to stole 20 million OP governance tokens from liquidity provider Wintermute’s wallet address. Wintermute provided an Ethereum (L1) multisig address, that had not yet deployed to Optimism (L2), instead of an L2 address. Wintermute began to deploy the L1 multisig contract to the same address on L2, but the hacker managed to deploy the contract before the company and stole 20 million OP tokens.

Interestingly, the hacker didn’t use the tokens to manipulate Optimism governance, instead sent 1 million OP tokens to Vitalik Buterin’s wallet address. Meanwhile, Yoav Weiss, who was explaining the attack, tweeted:

“And the plot thickens. As I was writing this explainer, the attacker delegated the 1M OP voting power to me: Thank you for delegating

Hint: no, I’m not the attacker and I don’t know who is. But now guessing it’s a whitehat.”

Meanwhile, the Wintermute team has urged the hacker to return the stolen Optimism tokens. Moreover, they are ready to work with the hacker for consulting opportunities or other forms of cooperation in the future. The liquidity provider offers a one-week time to the hacker to consider whitehat. Otherwise, Wintermute will return funds and track the hackers.

Optimism (OP) Price Falls 20% After the Hack

Ethereum scaling solution Optimism prices tumbled to an all-time low of $0.7142, falling more than 20% in the last 24 hours. The OP token prices, which are already underperforming after a failed listing, suffered another blow after the hack. At the time of writing, the OP price is trading at $0.8473, recovering some loss.

Wintermute hopes it is a whitehat attack as the attacker has only sold 1 million OP tokens, while the attacker still has 19 million OP tokens.