The 2nd half of February was terrible for the collective digital asset industry as the bears started to take over but matters were far worse for the IOTA foundation, as a wallet hack led to the organization shutting down its entire network.
Now, according to recent reports, it has been revealed that David Sønstebø, co-founder of the IOTA Foundation, has taken matters into his own hands as he has announced that he will directly compensate hack victims from his own digital asset holdings.
Sønstebø released the announcement on Discord and stated that in light of slow progress over the investigation, he had decided to utilize a significant portion of his own funds to compensate the victims personally. Sønstebø stated,
“To bring assurance to everyone, I will commit to the fact that all victims identified here shall be made whole again. […] In practice this means that a significant portion of my own holdings will go towards resolving this unfortunate incident. I have made the decision to safeguard the IOTA Foundation’s runway. We are closer than ever to cross the finish line in terms of delivering on the tech and paving the road towards adoption and standardization ever.”
Additionally, the IOTA founder clarified his stance that he and the IOTA Foundation themselves, were fundamentally unaccountable but they ‘ultimately feel responsible’ because they were unable to avoid the situation and prevent the major losses.
Furthermore, Sønstebø said that the authorities were still working on the situation in order to bring down the hackers and exhibit a sense of justice to the uneventful past proceedings.
Reports indicated that over 2.37 million US dollars were stolen during the attack; hence the community applauded the founder’s commendable gesture to remunerate the lost funds.
Trinity Wallet Hack and Current Update
On February 12th, 2020, IOTA foundation reported that a suspicious situation had risen with Trinity and users were informed not to access their wallets until further notice.
The situation got worse thereon as 30 minutes later, the foundation shut off the Coordinator node and since then, zero IOTA transactions have taken place on the network.
According to members from the IOTA team, the hackers targeted 10 high-profile IOTA accounts via “a third-part integration” of Trinity wallet. The exploitation of the wallet eventually allowed the attackers to steal the IOTA funds.
On 1st March, the foundation released a seed migration tool in response to the vulnerability detected in the Trinity wallet, through which users would be able to move their IOTA assets to safety.
The migration process has gone smoothly over the past week and according to a recent interview, the Co-Founder of IOTA suggested that the foundation is on track to re-launch the network of 10th March.
In spite of the longest outage suffered on a blockchain network, IOTA’s valuation and market sentiments remained fairly stable over the past 4 weeks. At press time, IOTA was valued at $0.21 with a market cap of just under $600million.