Vulcan Forged announced its plans to migrate its marketplace and infrastructure to decentralized wallets to guarantee more safety for its users.
Blockchain gaming studio and NFT marketplace, Vulcan Forged announced the compromise of 148 wallets. According to the announcement, more than 4.5 million PYR tokens were stolen, amounting to about 9% of the project’s total token supply.
PYR is the native token of the gaming ecosystem. It is used for making purchases within the network. In addition, the token can be traded on the firm’s decentralized exchange (DEX) purpose-built for gaming tokens, VulcanDEX which was recently launched. Also, it can be traded on a secondary market like Binance where it recently got listed. Given its value at the time of the theft, the volume of tokens stolen amounted to about $140 million.
In a similar occurrence recently, hackers stole $196 million from Bitmart exchange exploiting hot wallets on Ethereum and BSC.
Theft Causes Selling Pressure as Project Team Urges Calm
Once the team discovered the compromise, it advised its community to remove funds from the liquidity pools of decentralized exchanges. This move was to force the attacker to use centralized exchanges (which require identification) to convert the funds. However, the attacker still managed to sell tokens worth $2.5 million while the remaining $2 million PYR remain in a wallet untouched.
Subsequently, the project team announced the compromise of its system through a tweet. The announcement of the theft led to a selling pressure that caused the price of PYR to spiral downwards from over $30. At the time of writing, the token was trading at $23.99, down by 16.7%.
Vulcan Forged also urged calm promising to return the funds of all the affected wallets. The lost funds will be returned through the project’s treasury. Refunds will be made in form of the PYR and LAVA tokens. Users whose wallets were compromised are required by the company to open a Metamask account and send an email to [email protected] Afterward, their funds will be reimbursed to the provided wallet address.
Vulcan Forged to Trace Missing Funds and Prevent Similar Future Occurrence
The project announced it was attempting to trace the funds using the wallet address used in the heist. According to the company, it had reached out to several cryptocurrency exchanges so any transaction from the identified address would be blocked.
In addition, the company noted that there are indications the owner of the wallet may have done KYC with a centralized exchange. This means there must have been the exchange of personal information. As such, the firm announced it was collaborating with the authorities to track down the perpetrator.
Moving forward, Vulcan Forged announced it would continue work on development. It also announced plans to migrate its marketplace and infrastructure to decentralized wallets to guarantee more safety for its users.
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