The long-awaited NFT project did not seem to justify its noble goals – due to an error in the project’s smart contract, the auction had to be cancelled. This deprived the development team of access to $33 million.
This weekend, the long-awaited Akutars project was supposed to go live, but due to an exploit and a bug in the smart contract, 11,500 ETH was permanently locked in the smart contract, inaccessible even to the development team. Many experts claim that this was done by someone to indicate the presence of a vulnerability, and not to steal funds.
The project was launched at a Dutch auction on Friday. Its essence lies in the fact that the price is reduced until an offer is received, while the first offer wins the sale as long as the price is above the reserve.
5,495 of the available 15,000 NFTs were put up for sale with a starting price of 3.5 ETH. The smart contract was set to refund all bidders who underpriced. Aku Mint Pass holders also received a 0.5 ETH discount on each NFT.
0xInuarashi, the developer of several NFT projects, reached out to followers on Twitter, explaining that the Akutars smart contract was drafted in such a way that refunds to bidders had to be processed first before the team could withdraw funds. To withdraw funds, however, a minimum number of bids must be made, but the minimum number of bids has been set equal to the number of NFTs available for auction.
But due to some buyers taking multiple NFTs in a single bet, the terms of the smart contract mean it will never unlock, permanently sealing nearly $33 million in ETH.
A now-deleted tweet posted by Akutars, shared by DeFi developer foobar, says the developers approached them with a warning that their smart contract might be susceptible to error, but seemed to brush it off entirely, calling the potential exploit a “feature.” “.
During the mint, an unknown person executed a so-called “griefing contract” that blocked the ability of the Akutars contract to process refunds for those who underbid. This person even embedded a message to the Akutars team into the blockchain that he would stop the contract:
“Well that was fun, I didn’t mean to actually hack you. Otherwise, I wouldn’t use Coinbase. As soon as you guys publicly admit that the exploit exists, I will remove the block immediately.”
The Akutars developers immediately responded by claiming responsibility and suggesting that the exploit “was not done out of malice” and that the person “intended to draw attention to best practices for highly visible projects.” However, many were left without their funds.
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On the same day, project founder and former professional baseball player Mike Johnson apologized to the community, noting that after he let them down, he would “continue to build brick by brick” and work tirelessly to avoid similar problems in the future.
The team said that they will gradually return 0.5 ETH to Aku Mint Pass holders, and send NFT to the best bidders for free.
In an update posted on Sunday, the team revealed that it had rewritten the smart contract for mint, which was then reviewed by several developers, and plans to launch mint on Monday.
