The hacker who sniped 20 million Optimism (OP) Tokens last week after a mistake by token partner Wintermute has sent 1 Million Token to the Ethereum wallet of Vitalik Buterin.
Optimism is a layer-2 scaling solution for Ethereum, and OP tokens are native to its new DAO.
Wintermute, a liquidity provider, partnered with Optimism to streamline the trading of OP tokens and facilitate airdrops.
The liquidity provider sent 20 million OP tokens to a multi-signature address, later discovered to be a layer-1 Ethereum multi-sig wallet that had yet to be deployed to the Optimism mainnet. As a result, the account and funds became inaccessible.
Wintermute planned a recovery operation, but a hacker beat them to it by exploiting the opportunity to successfully infiltrate and steal all 20 million tokens worth about $35 million.
The hacker then sold off 1 million of the tokens, even after law enforcement threats, and held on to the remaining 19 million. After remaining silent for over a week, the hacker has since sent 1 million tokens, worth around $874,000, to the public wallet Vitalik Buterin.
Optimism has made several positive headlines in the past few weeks, barring this mishap that has tarnished its image to some extent.
