Akutar NFT's $34 million locked forever due to a misspelled word?!

Today, a NFT project called Akutar experienced a contract bug, which resulted in 11,539 ETH, worth $34 million USD or 200 million RMB, being permanently locked and unable to be withdrawn. A staggering 200 million RMB!

What is the logic behind the withdrawal process for the project party, and what are the flaws that prevent them from withdrawing?

The diagram below illustrates the function for the project party to withdraw funds. When the project party clicks the claimProjectFunds button, they can transfer the money to their own wallet. There are three layers of verification here. The first layer verifies whether the auction has ended. If it has, it proceeds to the second layer to check if the number of refund applicants exceeds the number of bidders. In fact, the project party has good intentions here, as they want to ensure that everyone has been refunded before they withdraw the funds. However, it is this layer of verification that has a problem. Do you remember what totalBids represents? It signifies the quantity of NFTs sold, not the number of bidders!

You might wonder, what's the issue with that? During bidding, a person can purchase multiple NFTs. So, the number of refund applicants actually represents the number of buyers. You are requiring the number of buyers to exceed the quantity of NFTs sold, but since each person can buy multiple items, if just one person buys two, it means the number of buyers can never exceed the quantity sold. If 10 people sell 11 items, how can you expect 10 to be greater than 11?

Let's check on Etherscan. The number of refundProgess is 3,699, indicating that there are 3,699 bidders. However, the totalBids is 5,495, meaning that 5,495 items have been sold, far exceeding 3,699. So, refundProgess can never be greater than totalBids, and these 2 billion will forever be locked in the contract for future generations to witness.

Therefore, it was a mistake by the project party in writing the word. Originally, they intended to write bidIndex for the number of buyers, but instead wrote totalBids for the quantity sold. A single word is valued at 2 billion, making it possibly the most expensive word in the world. Everyone, remember this word totalBids, as it is worth 2 billion!

Through this article, we have learned a new way of minting, the Dutch auction, and its principles. Additionally, we have been introduced to a 2 billion worth word, totalBids.

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