The Nomad Protocol is pleased to announce the launch of the Nomad Whitehat Prize. Hackers who were responsible for the theft of funds from the Nomad bridge earlier this month are being offered an incentive in the form of a Whitehat-inspired non-fungible token (NFT) to refund the money they stole.
1/ Our friends at @metagame created an earned NFT as a thank you to whitehats who returned funds from the Nomad Bridge Hack. Head over https://t.co/TWwuJwnRXj to claim it! pic.twitter.com/V87rkGhBEE
— Nomad (⤭⛓🏛) (@nomadxyz_) August 23, 2022
White Hat NFTs
The NFT company Metagame has created a non-fungible token in the shape of a white wizard’s hat. This token will be used in a partnership between Nomad and Metagame. According to the offer that was made public by Nomad, any hacker who returns at least 90 percent of the assets that he or she stole is qualified to mint the special NFT. Every return is checked with Metagame’s open source EVM translator before being processed.
The NFT is not functional and is more of a recognition of one’s virtuous actions than anything else. On the webpage for the Whitehat Prize, it says,
“We support people doing the right thing even if it’s for the wrong cause, and we hope that things like this will encourage more people to do the right thing. We hope that things like this will encourage more people to do the right thing.”
Brennan Spear, the inventor of Metagame, is of the opinion that recognizing individuals who do the right thing is an effective way to encourage them to perform other acts of goodness for the benefit of the community.
In addition to Metagame’s NFT, Nomad is working along with the social Web3 platform Forefront to provide an offering of one hundred FF tokens. At the time that this was being written, these were valued $24. However, you need to be one of the first fifty people to send in your payments for this offer to be valid.
Twitter gives its response
Users on Twitter did not hold back in their criticism of the offer that was made as an incentive for “good samaritans” to return the monies that they took during the bridge attack. The offer that Nomad came up with did not go over well with the users. Therefore, it is safe to say that they were not amused.
One person, for example, wrote, “Did the Nomad Twitter account get hacked as well?” in reference to the hack of the bridge that started it all.
Thats what the team come up with to solve the problem? Rewarding hacker with worthless NFT?
— Hinz ⌐◨-◨ (@hinzpak) August 23, 2022
Metagame provided this clarification in response to another user comment, which can be seen here.
“It was Metagame’s idea, and they were the ones who constructed it; all we did was bring it to Nomad. They have a lot of other things that are far more important for them to concentrate on! The primary focus of the metagame is on earned NFTs in general.”
The Money Heist of August
On August 2, 2022, the Nomad bridge was the target of a hacking incident, which resulted in the theft of total value locked (TVL) worth $190 million.
The exploit was said to be the first of its sort, according to the specialists. According to reports, the breach was made possible by a flaw in the most recent version upgrade of the protocol. The fact that it was so simple to do was what set it apart from other options. Following the completion of the initial transaction, all that was required was to copy the hacker’s initial transaction, alter the wallet address of the recipient, and then click the transmit button.
According to the findings of Etherscan, the Official Nomad Funds Recovery Address has received a total of $36.3 million in contributions as of this moment.