Major NFT Recovery: 36 BAYC and 18 MAYC Tokens Successfully Restored

Following a bounty payment, all stolen nonfungible tokens (NFTs) from the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) and Mutant Ape Yacht Club (MAYC) on the peer-to-peer trading platform NFT Trader have been recovered.

A security firm operating in the Web3 space reported the successful retrieval of 36 Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) and 18 Mutant Ape Yacht Club (MAYC) non-fungible tokens (NFTs) through a well-coordinated effort by their team, which worked extra hours over the weekend.

36 BAYC and 18 MAYC NFTs Recovered

The hack, which occurred on December 16, led to the loss of nearly $3 million of NFTs. The attacker communicated through public messages wherein they falsely implicated another user in the initial exploit and demanded ransom payments for the NFTs, mentioning, “I came here to pick up residual garbage.”

The attacker then proposed to return tokens to victims after being paid a ransom of 3 ETH per Bored Ape and 0.6 ETH per Mutant Ape. However, in a bizarre turn of events, they returned Bored Ape along with 31 ETH to a user along with staked Bored Apes to their owners while retaining the ApeCoin rewards.

Within a day, a community effort led by Boring Security, a non-profit Web3 security project funded by ApeCoin, successfully recovered assets valued at around $267,000.

“All 36 BAYC and 18 MAYC that the exploiter had are now in our possession. We sent her 10% of the floor price of the collections as a bounty. We will be working with the affected victims getting them back to them free of charge. Right after this coffee break… Victims, please open a ticket in our discord and PLEASE BE PATIENT.”

The recovery was facilitated by the payment of a 120 Ether bounty by Greg Solano, the co-founder of Yuga Labs, which is the creator of both BAYC and MAYC NFT collections.

According to the pseudonymous founder of Delegate, Foobar, the vulnerability allowed multicalling to external contracts surfaced after a “bad upgrade” earlier this month. This enabled unauthorized transfers of NFTs from their owners, stemming from previously granted trading permissions. Foobar mentioned that unless the permissions were revoked, there was a risk of the NFTs being stolen once more.

In addition to the NFT Trader hack, reports about additional breaches that resulted in the loss of Cool Cats and Squiggles from user wallets surfaced.

NFT Market Resurgence

The NFT market experienced a significant downturn this year, further complicated by hacking incidents. However, investors remain optimistic about the sector.

The Web3 division of the Japanese messaging app LINE successfully raised $140 million, with its immediate focus on integrating the mobile-enabled NFT platform DOSI with LINE’s existing NFT marketplace, LINE NFT.

Meanwhile, Metagood, another NFT marketplace, secured $5 million in seed funding led by Sora Ventures. Metagood’s Osura marketplace is among several competing for market share in Bitcoin ordinal trading.

Additionally, 1kx led a $3 million Series A funding round for nftperp, an NFT perpetual futures exchange that enables investors to take long or short positions on the floor prices of popular NFT collections.