I returned most of the stolen Nomad funds and all I got was this stupid NFT

by · August 23, 2022

Hackers behind the $190 million Nomad Bridge are now being incentivized with “whitehat” themed non-fungible tokens (NFTs) if they return nearly all of the funds they stole from the protocol earlier this month.

The exclusive NFT, which simply shows a white wizard’s hat, is offered by NFT company Metagame and can be minted by those who return at least 90% of their stolen funds to Nomad.

“If you haven’t refunded yet, you can still do it now! Metagame checks your tx history on chain automatically,” the Nomad team stated via Twitter on August 23rd.

Speaking to Cointelegraph, Metagame founder Brenner Spear noted that while he “has no idea if it will push anyone to return funds that otherwise wouldn’t have,” the move is part of a broader effort to promote and support good behavior in the sector:

“I support people doing the right things for the wrong reasons. More of the right things will happen, and maybe people will start doing more of the right things for the right reasons, too.”

The non-fungible token has no function, as it essentially serves as a trophy to represent an act of good faith. The first 50 people who return the funds in relation to this campaign will also receive 100 FF tokens ($53) from the web3 platform Forefront.

Nomad Bridge was originally hacked on August 2, after bad actors discovered a security hole in Nomad’s smart contracts that allowed them to extract funds that did not belong to them via questionable transactions.

According to a post-mortem analysis earlier this month by Coinbase’s principal blockchain threat intelligence researcher Peter Kacherginsky, and Heidi Wilder, a senior associate on the special investigations team, hundreds of copycats then joined in on the fun by copying the same code used to start. hacked but slightly changed the target token, token amount and recipient addresses.

Related: Ethereum moves forward with standards for smart contract security audits

The concept doesn’t seem to have gone down well on Twitter, but many users are taking the time to poke fun at the idea. @Huzmond wrote “Incentive go brrrrr” while @aldy_argr questioned if this was a “comedian account?”

“Is that what the team comes up with to solve the problem? Reward a hacker with worthless NFT?” @hinzpak chimed in, with the Metagame team responding that “It was Metagame’s idea, and built by Metagame – we brought it, Nomad. They have much more important things to focus on!”

As of August 8, Cointelegraph reported that white hat hackers had returned about $32.6 million of the total $190 million stolen.