Blockchain gaming studio Vulcan Forged was hacked on Tuesday and 4.5 million PYR, the platform’s native token, was stolen, the company announced on Twitter.
Fast facts
- Vulcan Forged also runs a decentralized exchange and a non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace. The attacker gained the private keys to 96 wallets and proceeded to empty them, making off with tokens worth approximately US$140 million at the time.
- Vulcan Forged CEO Jamie Thomson said in a video posted on Twitter: “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.” Venly was the semi-custodial wallet Vulcan Forged used.
- According to Etherscan, there are 6,498 wallets holding PYR tokens. Since keys to 96 wallets were stolen, the attacker stole on average US$1.46 million per wallet. This means that the hacker was able to pull off the large heist by targeting the whales.
- The firm is determined to reimburse all losses from its treasury and claims to have refunded a majority of the tokens lost. The company has asked affected users to create a metamask wallet for the refund. The company even promised to replace tokens other than PYR that were stolen, like Matic or Ethereum, but they would be replaced in equivalent of PYR. A tweet from the company said that all wallets have been secured and Vulcan Forged is moving to a decentralized wallet system that will be deployed in two days to offset such attacks in the future.
- Although the firm has refunded the lost PYR tokens, the token’s price has fallen 30% since Sunday when it was trading at around US$32 compared to the current price of US$21.72 at the time of writing. The market cap of the token has also dipped to US$412 million from US$612 million on Sunday.