Optimism airdrop package stolen, 20 million OP tokens used in smart contract must be noted

The Optimism team announced that in order to provide a smoother OP token airdrop experience, they have partnered with Wintermute to provide liquidity services. As a result, a total of 20 million OP tokens have been distributed from the foundation's partner fund to Wintermute.

The Optimism team has announced that in order to provide a smoother OP token airdrop experience, they have partnered with Wintermute to provide liquidity services. As a result, a total of 20 million OP tokens were transferred from the foundation's partner fund to Wintermute.

The Optimism Foundation sent two transactions separately and waited for confirmation from Wintermute before sending the next one. However, Wintermute later discovered that they were unable to access the tokens because the address provided was a multi-signature address on the Ethereum base chain, which had not yet been deployed to Optimism L2. Therefore, Wintermute initiated a recovery operation to attempt to deploy the multi-signature address contract on Optimism to the same address.

Unfortunately, a malicious actor took advantage of the situation. Optimism stated that the attacker found an opportunity to deploy the multi-signature contract to L2 with different initial parameters, gaining ownership of the 20 million OP tokens. The address has already sold one million OP tokens.

The Optimism Foundation sent two separate test transactions, and upon Wintermute’s confirmation for each, sent the rest.

— Optimism (✨🔴_🔴✨) (@optimismPBC) June 8, 2022

Wintermute team has reportedly committed to repurchasing these mishandled tokens and will buy them back in full when they are sold at that address.

On the Optimism Foundation's side, they have already provided Wintermute with an additional 20 million OP tokens for short-term emergency liquidity support. This measure is temporary and will not be continued in the future.

Optimism also mentioned that the governance tokens OP that were mishandled are currently not being used for governance activities. They have also locked the community discussion at that time to gain a better understanding of the situation.

Optimism believes that if a network upgrade is carried out now, the transfer of the remaining unsold OP tokens can be stopped, but they will not take this step. This is because Optimism is a permissionless network and should not be interfered with.

They consider Wintermute to be a world-class company, and such incidents will contribute to the progress of the industry. It will also raise awareness of the need to exercise caution when dealing with different contracts across chains.

The remaining stolen OP tokens have not been transferred yet. Both teams are actively monitoring the situation and will continue to transparently share updates.

Following the incident, the OP token briefly dropped by over 30%, and as of the deadline, it still experienced a daily decline of over 20%.