Hacker Stole $140M From Polygon’s Vulcan Forged Gaming Platform

A hacker stole $140M from Polygon’s Vulcan Forged gaming platform which is a blockchain game studio that runs a decentralized exchange and NFT marketplace to complement the play-to-earn titles so let’s read more today in our latest cryptocurrency news.

Players on the Vulcan Forged platform want to log off now as a Hacker stole $140M from Polygon’s gaming platform. The hacker exploited the platform to get a hold of the private keys of 96 crypto wallets and to take up to 4.5 million of the Vulcan Forged native PYR tokens in the processor 9% of the 50 million supply. The customers found themselves with $140 million less. Though the company vowed to make the affected users whole with money from its treasury and claimed that half of the stolen funds were repaid, it is still a very disappointing solution. The PYR dropped in value by over 30% in the past 24 hours from above $32 on a Sunday to below $21 as of the time of writing.

A video message from CEO Jamie Thomson on today’s hack. pic.twitter.com/ivW5EjVrhm

— Vulcan Forged (@VulcanForged) December 13, 2021

According to the company’s CEO Jamie Thomson, the hacker attacked the semi-custodial wallets that Vulcan Forged managed for its customers. The problem was with its wallet solution provider Venly but the vulnerability did occur with Vulcan Forged. Thomson said:

“What’s happened is someone’s exploited our servers, got the Venly credentials, and used it to extract the private keys of the MyForge users. Going forward, of course, we’re going to be using nothing but decentralized wallets so we never have to encounter this problem again.”

The $140 million is a huge sum for a gaming system that has almost no traction. According to Etherscan, there are 6501 wallets including those on the exchanges that hold PYR. By comparison, Axie Infinity shard tokens sit in 45,072 wallets, and given the high concentration of the tokens among new users, the hacker was able to steal $1.46 million per wallet by targeting the community’s whales. The attack brought Vulcan Forged market cap from $612 million to $397 million today.

As recently reported, Ethereum layer 2 scaling solution Polygon acquired ZK Tech developer Mir for $400 million, and the platform conducted the purchase with 250 million MATIC tokens as it also announced the backdrop of Polygon’s zk-day virtual event. After the transaction, MATIC’s price increased by more than 50%. Mir’s team will be joining Polygon to leverage its technology but also assist in the development of the new project.