The development team of the memecoin Normie (NORMIE) known as Base is currently engaged in negotiations with the hacker responsible for stealing funds due to a smart contract vulnerability. This incident caused the token’s market capitalization to plummet by $41.7 million in less than three hours.
Blockchain analytics company Lookonchain was one of the first to detect the exploit and inform Normie’s deployer address of the hacker’s offer through an on-chain message on May 26. Normie reportedly accepted the hacker’s offer to return 90% of the stolen NORMIE tokens, despite the fact that the price had already dropped by 96% as a result of the exploit. The condition attached to this agreement was that Normie would utilize the stolen funds, as well as $2.3 million from the team’s dev wallet, to launch a new token in order to compensate NORMIE holders. The hacker also requested that no retaliatory actions be taken, as stated in another on-chain message.
Normie’s team expressed their intention to relaunch the project on a new X account they had apparently created after their main account was suspended. They stated that this would happen once they regained access to their main Twitter account and received the funds from the exploiter. However, the temporary account was also suspended shortly after. The hacker remained firm in their stance, insisting that the token relaunch must occur prior to the return of the funds.
“Dinho,” one of the administrators of the official NORMIE Telegram group, was unable to provide a timeline for when NORMIE token holders might recover their stolen funds. Dinho’s X account was also suspended.
According to CoinGecko, the price of NORMIE began to decline at 3:55 am UTC on May 26. Within one hour, it had already dropped by over 92% to $0.0032. After two and a half hours, it reached a 99.5% decrease. Although there was a brief price spike to $0.019, it continued to decline, reaching $0.0016 at the time of writing, resulting in a 96% fall.
The market capitalization of NORMIE hit a low of $200,000 after falling from $41.9 million but has slightly recovered since then.
The team behind Quick Intel, a blockchain scam detection tool, claims that the smart contract vulnerability affected 72,000 NORMIE holders. This vulnerability was discovered in March.
The exact amount of funds stolen in this incident remains unclear.
NORMIE was launched during the recent memecoin frenzy on Base in March 2024 and reached a peak market capitalization of $130 million on April 2, according to CoinGecko.
A recent investigation by Cointelegraph revealed that 91% of Base memecoins have vulnerabilities that could potentially lead to significant losses for users.
In conclusion, the question remains whether crypto projects should engage in negotiations with hackers, although the answer is likely to be negative.