Nomad that lures hackers to return stolen funds in exchange for exclusive NFT
Nomad Protocol has rolled out the Nomad Whitehat Award. It’s a new scheme where hackers who looted the Nomad bridge earlier this month are incentivized to return the stolen funds in exchange for a Whitehat-inspired NFT.
1/ Our friends at @metagame created an earned NFT as a thank you to whitehats who returned funds from the Nomad Bridge Hack. Head over to claim it! pic.twitter.com/V87rkGhBEE
— Nomad (⤭⛓🏛) (@nomadxyz_) 23 August 2022
Exclusive NFTs and more
Nomad has teamed up with NFT firm Metagame, with the latter creating a non-fungible token out of literally a white wizard’s hat. According to the offer shared by Nomad, any hacker who returns at least 90% of the funds he/she stole is eligible to mint the exclusive NFT. All returns are verified using Metagame’s open source EVM translator.
NFT serves no purpose and is more intended as a reward for one’s good deeds. The Whitehat Prize website reads,
“We support people who do the right thing even for the wrong reason and we hope that things like this will encourage more people to do the right thing.”
Metagame founder Brennan Spear believes that recognizing individuals who do the right thing is to stimulate future good deeds for the benefit of the community.
In addition to Metagame’s NFT, Nomad is also partnering with Web3 social platform Forefront to offer 100 FF tokens. These were at the time of writing worth $24. However, this offer is only valid for the first fifty people who return funds.
Twitter responds
Twitter users did not hold back as they roasted the offer which was meant to encourage “good samaritans” to return the money they took during the bridge attack. In fact, it’s safe to say that users were not amused by the offer that Nomad came up with.
For example, one user tweeted, “Also got the Nomad twitter account hacked,” referring to the bridge hack that started it all.
Is that what the team comes up with to solve the problem? Rewarding hacker with worthless NFT?
— Hinz ⌐◨-◨ (@hinzpak) 23 August 2022
In reply to another comment by a user, Metagame came out to clarify,
“It was Metagame’s idea, and built by Metagame – we just took it with Nomad. They have much more important things to focus on! Metagame is focused on earned NFTs in general.”
Heist
On August 2, 2022, the Nomad bridge was hacked, an episode in which $190 million in Total Value Locked (TVL) was stolen.
Experts described the exploit as the first of its kind. A bug in the protocol’s latest upgrade reportedly enabled the hack. What made it different was the effortless process. After the first transaction, just copy the hacker’s original transaction and change the recipient’s wallet address, and press send.
Data from Etherscan shows that so far $36.3 million has been returned to the official Nomad Funds Recovery Address.
