ZKsync recovers $5M of stolen tokens after hacker accepts bounty offer

The ZKsync Affiliation has confirmed the restoration of $5 million price of stolen tokens from an April 15 ZKsync safety incident involving its airdrop distribution contract.

The hacker agreed to simply accept a ten% bounty and return 90% of the remaining stolen tokens, transferring the ZKsync Safety Council nearly $5.7 million throughout three transfers on April 23.

“We’re happy to share that the hacker has cooperated and returned the funds inside the protected harbor deadline,” ZKsync Affiliation posted to X on April 23, which was later reposted by ZKsync’s X account.

Matter Labs, the corporate behind the ZKsync protocol, additionally reposted the information shared on X.

The ZKsync X account beforehand confirmed that no user funds were compromised.

The hacker sent two transfers on the ZKsync Period blockchain, consisting of $2.47 million price of ZKsync (ZK) tokens and $1.83 million price of Ether (ETH) to the ZKsync Safety Council’s ZKsync Period handle.

One other 776 ETH price practically $1.4 million was additionally despatched to their safety council’s Ethereum handle, Etherscan data exhibits.

The primary switch was made on April 23 at 2:39:57 pm UTC on and the final switch was made roughly 13 minutes later — all inside the 72-hour window that ZK Sync had initially set.

ZKsync Affiliation stated the corporate would publish a last report revealing extra particulars from the safety incident.

How the hack occurred

The hacker breached ZKsync’s admin account, permitting them to take advantage of the airdrop distribution contract’s sweepUnclaimed() perform to mint 111 million unclaimed ZK tokens, price roughly $5 million on the time of the April 15 assault.

The hack occurred whereas ZKsync was within the process of airdropping 17.5% of ZK’s token provide to ecosystem individuals.

The recovered quantity — nearly $5.7 million — exceeded the $5 million initially stolen because of an increase available in the market worth of the stolen tokens, with ZK and ETH rising 16.6% and eight.8% respectively for the reason that April 15 assault, according to CoinGecko knowledge.

Regardless of the asset restoration, the ZK token didn’t rise considerably on the information and is at the moment down 0.2% during the last 24 hours.

ZKsync Era is an Ethereum layer 2 resolution that makes use of zero-knowledge rollups to batch and course of transactions offchain. It has practically $59 million in whole worth locked on its chain and has over $2 billion in real-world belongings onchain, according to DefiLlama and RWA.xyz.

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