Hacker Steals Smol Brains NFTs…And Then Gives Them Back

Crisis averted! To the community’s surprise and delight, the hacker who stole the Smol Brains NFTs eventually returned his loot to the rightful owners. NFT holders can now breathe a sigh of relief because this would have been a pricey virtual heist. According to reports, the stolen collection was valued at over $1.4 million at the time of the attack.

To recap, the Treasure ecosystem is building the decentralized Nintendo for the Metaverse. It is made up of the “console” (and its building blocks), its own play-to-earn games, games from other developers, and a launchpad for those games. Users can also trade the games’ assets as NFTs in the Marketplace. Smol Brains NFTs are one of the most popular on Treasure.

Hacker Returns Stolen Smol Brains NFTs

Treasure is the biggest NFT ecosystem on layer 2 protocol Arbitrum. Last week, hackers exploited a vulnerability in the protocol that allowed them to mint NFTs for no cost. Blockchain addresses uncovered by sleuths show several “Smol Brains” and “Legions” were stolen in the attack.

The developers of the project firmly said that they had already identified and rectified the cause of the issue. Based on the post-mortem analysis, they admitted that “this was a basic bug arising from a prior fix that should have been identified earlier.”

Now that most of the compromised assets are back to their rightful owners, the team is working hard to get the project back on track. They also have a plan for NFT holders who didn’t receive their NFTs. Basically, they will propose remediation options to ensure users are made whole. Then, the DAO will vote on these.

$MAGIC is the native token and currency of the Treasure ecosystem. The price of the token fell by 40% an hour after the exploit. However, it seems that the return of the NFTs by the hacker has stabilized the market. Prices have since recovered to the $3.34 mark, as per data from CoinGecko.