Optimism Exploiter Sends 1 Million OP Tokens to Vitalik Buterin

According to PeckShield, the attacker who sniped 20 million Optimism (OP) tokens meant for crypto market creator Wintermute, transferred 1 million of them to wallet account belonging to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. #PeckShieldAlert ~1m $OP transfered to @VitalikButerin from Wintermute/OP exploiters https://t.co/U1c2MyeObE pic.twitter.com/wdLOd0XveC — PeckShieldAlert (@PeckShieldAlert) June 9, 2022 Unclear Reason for Transfer According to Etherscan data, the transfer occurred at 12:26 AM UTC, with the attacker sending tokens worth $874,000. It’s unclear why they transferred the Optimism tokens to Vitalik Buterin wallet after selling a significant portion. One factor could be that the coins are largely illiquid on decentralized exchanges due to the lack of liquidity and cannot be sold for much currently. Yoav Weiss, an Ethereum Foundation security researcher, also received the voting rights for the 1 million tokens from the exploiter. Buterin had earlier delegated to Weiss his 1,746 OP tokens from the Optimism airdrop. Weiss has tweeted that he is not the hacker but that the individual could be a white hat hacker. Wintermute made a mistake, which led to the attack. Optimism granted the crypto market maker a grant of 20 million OP tokens in exchange for a multi-signature Ethereum address that had yet to be put on the Optimism network. Because of this oversight, the hacker could claim the undeployed address on Optimism and...