What Happened?

Well if you haven't heard, around a month or so ago, 98,000 ETH were stolen from the Solana Wormhole. This is essentially a decentralized swap service that allows users to exchange Solana for cryptocurrencies on other networks. A hacker (or group) was able to exploit a weakness in the contract and steal all of these funds from users.

I am by no means a coder, but in the last few days, there has been some discussion about the details on Twitter and I have been seeking a way to understand what happened. Well, I went past a tweet and it seems to be a pretty simple explanation for what happened and it goes back to such a basic mathematical concept that it is mind-blowing that a mistake like this could be made.

My god. pic.twitter.com/y8uruq3BvB

— mike (@mikeinspace) March 15, 2022

So essentially... a double-negative and a double-positive both equated to the same approval outcome... The hacker submitted two incorrect inputs and was approved by the system for the massive withdrawal.

Two negative numbers or two positive numbers both equaling a positive number is the concept that I referred to. Now of course, this math concept is a bit of a metaphor for the situation, but apparently the mistake that cost investors millions of dollars was something that should have been avoided by any programmer with over a few months of experience.

Is There More To This?

This feels like such a mind-blowing mistake that I'm wondering if it was a plant. I'm throwing my tin-foil hat on here for sure, but I just can't imagine how something like that would slip by a dev team experienced enough to create a cross-chain swap platform. Maybe someone looked the other way or changed the code late in the process to include such an easily exploitable mistake.

I believe that the funds were replenished by the team and they assured investors that there would be audits and improvements, so maybe this was a play to get money laundered or line the pockets of team members? All of this is theoretical thinking and I have absolutely no evidence (nor do I plan on getting any), but it is just wild to think about the possibility.

Anyone thinking things look super weird here? Not good for Solana in any way, even if it was an honest mistake.

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My name is Rob and I am a prospective law student with interests in cryptocurrency and blockchain. I have enjoyed my time thus far engaging with Web 3.0 and am looking to continue learning more and sharing what I learn through my experience