Following a rookie error Wintermute lost 20 million OP tokens

Wintermute made a mistake and lost 20 million OP tokens that were given to them with the idea to help users acquiring the OP airdrop. The funds were later taken by an alleged hacker, who has since sold 1 million of them, and yesterday sent 1 million to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin.

Optimism announced they partnered with Wintermute for liquidity providing services to help with a “smoother experience for users acquiring OP”. The popular L2 solution allocated 20 million OP tokens to Wintermute from its Partner Fund. The process of transferring the tokens included two test transactions from Optimism being sent to the address provided by Wintermute and only after the confirmation from Wintermute’s side that the funds have arrived from both transactions, the Optimism Foundation sent the rest of the 20 million tokens.

According to a public statement released by the Optimism Foundation, once the remainder of the funds were sent, Wintermute discovered they couldn’t access these tokens as the address they provided was an Ethereum multisig that wasn’t yet deployed on Optimism. Once the mistake was discovered, Wintermute began “a recovery operation”, which was an attempt to deploy the Ethereum multisig contract to the same address on L2. However, a so-called hacker managed to deploy a multisig to L2 with the same address, as per Optimism, after using the proper initialization parameters, before the ”recovery operation” was completed and took control of the 20 million OP tokens.

Since this happened, the Wintermute and Optimism teams tried contacting the address holding the lost funds in hopes it may be controlled by a Whitehat hacker as it keeps holding the tokens, but there has been no answer. To remedy the lost, Wintermute has committed to buying all OP tokens sold by the wallet on the market and is monitoring its every move, which is how the 1 million OP tokens sent to Vitalik Buterin was discovered.

Wintermute’s message to the Optimism community, posted on the Optimism governance forum, finishes with a threat of doxing the person holding their lost tokens, and “delivering them to the corresponding juridical system”, were they to not return the assets. Later, the address controlling the lost OP tokens sent another transaction to Vitalik Buterin’s wallet with a message stating they trust him to verify the return address, following which the remaining 18 million OP tokens will be returned to their rightful holder, as reported by crypto reporter Colin Wu on Twitter.