Jay Freeman is a developer and analyst who caught a bug in a crypto platform that allowed infinite token generation. For his work, the Optimism company rewarded him with 2 million dollars.
Jay Freeman, better known among professionals by his nickname Saurik, located a flaw in Ethereum, which would have allowed a possible and not so honest hacker to create cryptocurrencies infinitely.
“On February 2nd I reported a critical security issue to Optimism – an ‘L2 scaling fix’ for Ethereum – that would allow an attacker to replicate money on any chain using their ‘OVM 2.0’ fork of go-ethereum (to which they call l2geth),” says Saurik in a statement, which we leave you linked to.
The vulnerability gave the option to whoever detected it to have access to an unlimited number of OETH tokens, the Optimism version of ethereum, one of the largest cryptocurrencies on the market that was trading this Tuesday at 2,750 dollars per unit.
Quickly, Optimism, a firm specializing in smart contracts based on the Ethereum network, moved to fix this flaw in its nodes and infrastructure, as well as to fix subsequent projects that used its code base.
“We are very grateful for the time Saurik took to analyze our protocol for a year and for that we reward him with our maximum financial incentive to detect vulnerabilities,” reports Optimism. We are talking about 2 million dollars.
These so-called white hat hackers are of vital importance in this technological world.
“Working in crypto is both fun and scary, because the financial stakes are often extremely high. That is why security research is so much more relevant than in other fields”, acknowledges Freeman.
However, the current situation seems to be a bit scrambled at the security level. Failures in the NFT platform, Opensea, failures in the Ethereum network, thefts in cypto.com or Bitmart…
Now more than ever, the presence of these figures looking for security flaws and trying to maintain the integrity of crypto platforms seems necessary.
