Fantom Foundation Awards $1.7M Bounty Reward

The Fantom Foundation, the organization behind the Fantom blockchain platform, has successfully addressed a critical security flaw following a hacking incident in October that led to a loss of $550,000.

On October 17, the Fantom Foundation experienced a breach in its hot wallet, resulting in an unknown attacker siphoning off 1% of the foundation's funds. In response, the foundation ceased using certain compromised wallets and reassigned them, suggesting that the attack was specifically targeted.

An independent security expert later identified an additional risk linked to the hack and informed the Fantom Foundation, as detailed in a blog post dated November 20. This risk involved a dormant administrative token within Fantom’s ERC-20 FTM contract on Ethereum, which, if exploited, could have enabled the hacker to mint additional Fantom tokens.

The Fantom Foundation assessed that this vulnerability could have led to a potential loss of $170 million, based on the token's value at the time of the hack. However, they noted that the market likely wouldn't have been able to fully absorb such a large number of tokens.

The foundation acted swiftly to neutralize the threat and awarded the security researcher who discovered the vulnerability a sum of $1.7 million as a token of appreciation for their crucial contribution.

Despite the recent security breach and loss of half a million dollars, the value of the Fantom token has seen a significant increase over the past month. As of the latest update, the token's price stood at $0.31, marking an 82% rise since the hacking incident, according to CoinGecko data. Over the past year, the token has also shown a 78% increase in value.

FTM token 90 days price chart. (Source: CoinGecko)

The Fantom network, launched in late 2019, is a blockchain protocol designed for the development and deployment of decentralized applications. The Fantom Foundation's Opera blockchain is an open-source platform compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine, facilitating user interactions with the Fantom network through MetaMask and other wallets.

This recent incident is not the first security challenge faced by the Fantom Foundation. In July 2023, the foundation was hit by a significant multichain bridge hack, resulting in a loss of $126 million in cryptocurrency. Following this event, Fantom creator Andre Cronje pointed out a discrepancy between the perceived and actual security levels of the Multichain platform, which ceased operations in mid-July 2023.