2,400 Wallets Reportedly Compromised Ahead of Arbitrum Airdrop

Sahana Kiran
Arbitrum
Source – Crypto News

The cryptocurrency industry has been eagerly awaiting for the Arbitrum airdrop. The highly anticipated event is expected to occur on March 23. The hype around the airdrop has been gaining immense traction. While it is certainly good for the network as a whole, it might be taking a toll on certain investors.

A recent finding by Arkham, a blockchain intelligence firm, shows that 2,400 might be exploited. A wallet address, which is now marked as an “Arbitrum Airdrop Exploiter” has reportedly been sending out Gas to these 2,400 wallets.

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These wallets await the airdrop after “approving” the ARB token. Approving these tokens permits the transfer of all ERC20 tokens owned in the account to another address. In the aforementioned scenario, a single function call would let the hacker simply shift the ARB tokens from the victim addresses. Further elaborating on how the exploiter carried this out, Arkham said,

“…these are 2400 wallets for which the hacker somehow accessed the seed phrase/private key. He approved $arb on the 0x59 contract – in order to sweep all the ARB out of the wallets by calling a function through the contract, rather than attempting to submit transactions individually.”

While the hacker already entails access to these funds, Arkham pointed out a way to recover these funds.

zkSync bridging records 5X increase following Arbitrum airdrop announcement

The fervor around this event not only boosted Abriturm’s DeFi presence but also an array of factors followed suit. Another layer-2 solution, zkSync, has benefited from the buzz around its airdrop by experiencing considerable week-over-week growth.

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In the previous seven days, more than 39,000 addresses have bridged over $871 million to zkSync, according to data from analytics firm Nansen. In the past week, there have been five times as many addresses bridging to zkSync.

The future airdrops with the most potential value, after the upcoming Arbitrum airdrop, are zkSync and StarkNet. On March 17, approximately 5,000 customers used the zkSync bridge to deposit more than 536 ETH, while nearly 3,000 users used the StarkNet bridge to deposit more than 234 ETH. While the airdrop is boosting the ecosystem in many ways, perpetrators were also seen taking advantage of the same.