Most of the OP tokens stolen in an exploit have been returned, according to the Optimism Foundation.
On June 8, the Foundation had disclosed that an attacker had drained a wallet containing 20M OP, the governance tokens of Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solution Optimism.
Optimism had sent the 20M OP to a wallet controlled by Wintermute, a market maker tapped to provide liquidity during the launch of the OP token. The tokens ended up in an inaccessible wallet and the attacker was able to drain the tokens before Wintermute could perform the highly technical operation required to move the OP to another, more secure wallet.
Wintermute accepted blame for the exploit, and had pledged to buy an equivalent amount of OP tokens whenever the attacker sells them.
Now, it seems like it won’t have to do that.
“Over the past few hours, the address opened a line of communication with Wintermute on-chain and 17mm of 20mm OP has now been returned,” Optimism said.
1M OP sent by the exploiter to Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin is also being recovered after the exploiter sent him a message encoded in a transaction earlier today.
The attacker has kept 2M OP tokens as a “bounty,” Optimism said.
OP rose almost 2% in the hour since the news was announced and is currently trading at $0.86, up 5% in the last 24 hours according to data from CoinGecko.
