Fantom Basis awards $1.7M bounty for stopping $170M drain

The Fantom Basis, a nonprofit group creating the Fantom blockchain platform, has eradicated a major vulnerability after a $550,000 hack in October.

On Oct. 17, the Fantom Foundation suffered a hot wallet hack, with an unknown attacker draining 1% of Fantom Basis’s funds. The muse subsequently stopped utilizing among the affected wallets, reassigning them to a Fantom worker, making it a “focused assault.”

Following the incident, an unnamed safety researcher found a further potential danger related to the hack and alerted the Fantom Basis, based on a weblog put up on Nov. 20. The vulnerability was related to a dormant admin token for Fantom’s ERC-20 FTM contract, which might probably permit the attacker the power to mint a portion of Fantom (FTM) for themselves on Ethereum.

In keeping with the Fantom Basis, the found vulnerability might have allowed the hacker to empty $170 million utilizing the pockets entry. The group stated the worth of the potential loss is predicated on the token value on the time of the hack, “although this estimate doesn’t think about the market’s inadequate liquidity to soak up the tokens totally.”

The Fantom Basis stated that the vulnerability was “mitigated shortly,” and the group awarded the unnamed researcher $1.7 million in recognition of the contribution. The announcement added:

“The Fantom Basis is devoted to upholding the very best safety requirements for our platform, and we stay grateful for the safety researchers who contribute to this effort.”

The Fantom Basis didn’t instantly reply to Cointelegraph’s request for remark.

Associated: Poloniex says hacker’s identity is confirmed, offers last bounty at $10M

Regardless of the Fantom Basis shedding half 1,000,000 to a hack one month in the past, the Fantom token has risen over the previous 4 weeks. The token has added 82% of worth since Oct. 17, buying and selling at $0.31 on the time of writing, based on CoinGecko. The token can also be up 78% over the previous 12 months, based on the information.

Launched in late 2019, the Fantom community is a blockchain protocol that allows customers to construct and deploy decentralized functions (DApps). The Fantom Basis’s Opera is a permissionless blockchain suitable with the Ethereum Virtual Machine, which permits customers to work together with the Fantom community on MetaMask, a number one self-custodial cryptocurrency pockets.

Fantom’s latest $550,000 hack isn’t the primary assault on the Fantom Basis or its customers. In July 2023, Fantom suffered a massive multichain bridge hack, which resulted within the lack of $126 million value of cryptocurrency. Fantom creator Andre Cronje subsequently claimed that the Fantom workforce was misled concerning the precise safety degree of Multichain, which ceased operations in mid-July 2023.

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