An attacker stole 96 private keys from crypto gaming ecosystem Vulcan Forged earlier on Monday. The attacker thieved away $140 million in cryptocurrency.
At the time of the attack, the 96 wallets held 4.5 million PYR, worth $140 million, taking into account about 9% of the project’s total token supply and 23.7% of the circulating supply (see here). As per reports, other assets including ETH and MATIC may also have been taken, the team said in a tweet.
What is Vulcan Forged?
Vulcan Forged, primarily a game studio, offers on its platform six different blockchain-based games. It also offers a variety of crypto activities, and has its own decentralized exchange and an NFT marketplace. Users can trade its native token PYR on the platforms.
When an account is registered on Vulcan Forged, a set of wallets are created for the users on the Ethereum, Polygon, and VeChain blockchains. The platform manages users’ private keys on their behalf, and creates wallets through wallet management service Venly.
Lawrence Pluym, Community head at Venly, said in a statement in Venly’s Discord channel that they are currently getting an audit done to check if only Vulcan Forged wallets were attacked.
PYR price dropped down 22% from $31 to $24 after the attack.
Vulcan Froged mentioned in a tweet that the project’s treasury will send out PYR and LAVA tokens to those affected.
As per the tweets, they have contacted all exchanges to blacklist the address. “It also seems that wallet owner may have KYC(d) on an exchange we are in contact with,” Vulcan Forged tweeted. They are also removing the semi-custodial solutions from their ecosystem, and the users will now look after their own private keys.
Earlier this year, there was another attack on BadgerDAO with a theft worth $120 million. While the attack didn’t reveal specific flaws within Blockchain tech itself, it managed to exploit the older “web 2.0” technology that most users need to use to perform transactions, according to an IANS reports.
