flâneur

Escaping the Dark Forest

samczsun.com · 2,496 words · saved by 1 readers

On September 15, 2020, a small group of people worked through the night to rescue over 9.6MM USD from a vulnerable smart contract. This is our story.

I was about to wrap up for the night when I decided to take another look at some smart contracts. I wasn’t expecting anything interesting, of course. Over the past few weeks I had seen countless yield farming clones launch with the exact same pitch: stake your tokens with us and you could be the next cryptocurrency millionaire. Most were simply forks of well-audited code although some tweaked bits and pieces, sometimes with catastrophic results. But amidst all of the noise there was some code I hadn’t seen before. The contract held over 25,000 Ether, worth over 9,600,000 USD at the time, and w

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