Why This Hacker Sent 1M Optimism Tokens To Vitalik Buterin

The inventor of Ethereum Vitalik Buterin was the unintended recipient of 1 million OP tokens from this network’s scalability solution Optimism. The team behind this project addressed concerns about a potential exploit related to the launch of their governance token. Related Reading | TA: Bitcoin Stuck In Key Range, Why A Major Breakout Is Possible As clarified by Optimism, they entered a deal with liquidity provider Wintermute to “facilitate a smoother experience for users” looking to buy OP and participate in the project’s governance model. As part of the agreement, Optimism sent 20 million OP tokens to a multi-signature address. However, the liquidity provider was unable to access the funds as it discovered the address was designed as an Ethereum layer-1 multi-sig without an Optimism, which operates as a second layer solution, smart contract deployment. About this, the liquidity provider said: As we communicated the wallet address to the Optimism team, we made a serious error. The Optimism partnered began a “recovery operation” to gain access to the funds, as they concluded with Wintermute that the funds “were potentially retrievable and that nobody other than Wintermute could recover those funds”, the liquidity provider said in a statement. The recovery operation was scheduled, the liquidity provider clarified, for June 7th, 2022, but a hacker beat them to it. The team behind the Ethereum second layer solution explaine...