Web3 is Going Just Great

Plasma paused the protocol after detecting the attack.

The first attacker, who stole the bulk of the assets, sent an on-chain message to Prisma claiming that they had performed a "whitehat rescue", and inquired about returning the funds. In later messages, however, they asked the project to answer questions about their security practices and projects' responsibilities to users to prevent attacks. The attacker then transferred the stolen funds to Tornado Cash — indicating their return is unlikely.

In another message, the attacker was angry that Prisma had not expressed gratitude to them or remorse to their users, and was angry they had used terms like "exploit" and "attack" in their description of the incident. They demanded that the team reveal their identities, apologize, and thank the attacker in an online press conference.

One of the co-founders, known only as "Paul", claimed on Discord that he was "trying to investigate" the movement of funds, which have been blamed on the project's other co-founder, John Kim.

Conversations on Discord suggest that a remaining $3 million in treasury funds were protected, and that the remaining LENX team may have been able to convince Binance to freeze the account that received stolen funds. However, little has been verifiably confirmed to date.

LENX is backed by the Frax Finance lending protocol.

Things went awry in the land of the schnibbles and snuggeries when an attacker siphoned around 17,400 ETH ($62.5 million). Various descriptions of the attack circulated, with blockchain sleuth zachxbt attributing it to a recently hired developer, and crypto developer 0xQuit claiming the theft appeared to have been "planned since deploy".

Some began discussing the possibility that the Blast layer-2 blockchain might forcibly roll back the chain to "undo" the hack. Some have argued this is contra to the crypto ethos or would set a bad precedent, while others have argued that as a blockchain focused more on gaming and experimentation and less on decentralization and other facets of crypto ideology, it would be a reasonable step.

Some hours after the attack, the exploiter was convinced to return the funds.