Optimism, an Ethereum layer-2 solution has once again made headlines. This time it’s bigger than the 70 percent drop it endured post its very first airdrop last week. About 20 million OP tokens were sent to the wrong address while the network prepping for its big launch. The Optimism Collective DAO’s mistake caused the loss of all the 20 million tokens.
Once again confusion between Layer 1 and Layer 2 addresses emerged as the root cause of the hack. Optimism decided to employ market maker, Wintermute. However, Wintermute delivered an Ethereum [L1] address instead of an L2 address. This address, however, wasn’t deployed to Optimism. Banking on this, a hacker veered in and stole the 20 million OP tokens even before Wintermute could deploy the contract.
The community assumed that the hacker would either dump all the tokens or use them to meddle with Optimism’s governance. But, surprisingly the hacker decided to share some of the stolen OP tokens. The hacker reportedly sent about 1 million OP tokens to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin.
The community was quite surprised by this. So much so that some of them speculated that Buterin was behind the hack.
Buterin wasn’t the only one to have received the stolen OP tokens. Earlier today, the hacker reportedly sent 1 million OP tokens to Yoav Weiss a hacker at the Ethereum Foundation. Weiss went on to clear the air by suggesting that he wasn’t the attacker. His tweet read,
“And the plot thickens. As I was writing this explainer, the attacker delegated the 1M OP voting power to *me*: Thank you for delegating 🙂
Hint: no, I’m not the attacker and I don’t know who is. But now guessing it’s a whitehat.”
No more optimism in OP token?
Looks like pessimism had taken over the Optimism market. Right after the hacker stole all the funds, OP dropped to an all-time low of $0.7142. During press time, however, the asset was trading for $0.8926 with an 11.93 percent drop over the last couple of hours. This was nearly 80 percent below its all-time high of $4.57.
As confusion in the market persists, the community eagerly awaits the Ethereum co-founder’s take on the 1 million OP tokens in his account.