According to the most recent update, the hacker of 20 million OP tokens has returned 17 million OP tokens to the Optimism Foundation in several onchain transactions. The information was revealed by security company PeckShield. Earlier, today, Optimism’s hacker showed their willingness to conditional refund the 18 million OP tokens that were left with them in an onchain message. The anonymous offender promised to repay the exploited tokens conditionally in an on-chain message. Optimism, a Layer-2 scaling solution for Ethereum, publicised the loss of 20 million (about $35 million) OP tokens in a blog post on June 9 owing to an address issue on the company’s end while sending OP coins to Wintermute.
How were the 20 million tokens hacked?
The Optimism team was sending 20 million OP tokens intended for a loan to Wintermute, when due to a mix-up with another address hackers were able to withdraw the funds. Later, the hacker sold one million of them and transferred another one million to an Optimism address said to belong to Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin.
Conditional return
In the blog post of June 9, the Wintermute team has requested hackers to return the stolen tokens to a particular return address and promised that no legal action would be taken if this was done.
The hacker promised to make the transfer in an on-chain message to Vitalik on June 10, but only if Buterin made the first step and transferred the 1 million OP tokens he had been supplied to check the legitimacy of the return address.
