Altcoin

How Optimism received the worst of the BASE exploit

Attackers exploit a backdoor contract on Base, enabling them to accumulate huge amounts of ETH. Here’s how Optimism was impacted from the attack.

Published

1 year ago

on

  • Attackers amassed huge amounts of ETH by minting new tokens on BASE.
  • Despite declining sentiment, activity on Optimism remained high.

The highly anticipated debut of the BASE network has drawn the attention of numerous malicious actors. Aegis’ data indicated persistent exploitation of vulnerabilities within the system by these threat actors. This posed a significant challenge to the network’s integrity and security.

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Attackers run rampant

Aegis’ inquiry unveiled an address that exploited a backdoor contract to systematically generate tokens and subsequently profit from their sale. This entity successfully minted 40 tokens, amassing a total profit of around 597 ETH (~$1M). At press time, the ill-gotten 597 ETH were transferred, exacerbating the detrimental impact of this scam.

Some of the tokens minted included- Base DOGE, Base ELON and Base BOT.

Will this impact Optimism?

These exploits, coupled with the recent events occurring on the Base network, could negatively impact protocols associated with it as well. For instance, Optimism could be one of the networks that could be impacted.

The Base network was built on the OP stack, due to which many addresses flocked to the Optimism network during the Base hype. If sentiment around the Base network declines, it could have adverse impacts on the protocol.

At press time, the number of active addresses on the Optimism network had seen significant growth over the last few months. However, the growth could be hindered due to the recent events that occurred on the BASE network.

Source: token terminal

Worldcoin comes to the rescue

Even though the current state of Coinbase posed a threat to Optimism’s growth, it is important to keep in mind that the increasing activity on the protocol is being driven by other factors as well. The popularity of Worldcoin

has also played a huge role in Optimism’s popularity.

Realistic or not, here’s OP’s market cap in BTC’s terms

On 27 July, the launch of Worldcoin caused the transactions on the Optimism network to flip those on the Arbitrum protocol. Even though the dominance of Optimism in the layer 2 sector was short-lived, it does go on to show how Optimism’s collaborations could impact its growth in the future.

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