The development team behind the meme coin project Normie (NORMIE) has announced they are negotiating with a hacker to recover 90% of the funds stolen due to a smart contract vulnerability, which caused the token’s market capitalization to plummet.
Just hours after the hack, Normie’s market cap dropped by $41.7 million, from nearly $42 million to a mere $200,000.
On-chain analysis account Lookonchain was one of the first to identify the incident. The attacker later offered to return the funds to the project team through an on-chain message.
I offer to return 90% of the exploited ETH, keeping 10% as a bug bounty (with no reprisals). One condition: it, and the 600 ETH in the dev wallet, are used to fairly launch a new token that is used to reimburse NORMIE holders.
The $NORMIE exploiter sent a message to Normie Deployer.
The condition for returning 90% of the exploited ETH is that it and the 600 $ETH in the developer’s wallet are used to fairly launch a new token to reimburse $NORMIE holders.https://t.co/vmrXdgFMa2 pic.twitter.com/L7UkVbxZOe
— Lookonchain (@lookonchain) May 26, 2024
Normie’s X account was suspended for “violating X’s policies.” Seizing this opportunity, numerous fake accounts have been spamming X with phishing links disguised as “user refunds.”
The hacker further complicated matters by demanding the project relaunch the token before returning the stolen funds.
Dinho, an admin of the NORMIE Telegram group, stated that the project could not confirm when NORMIE token holders might recover their stolen funds. Dinho’s X account has also been suspended.
Within an hour of the hack, the NORMIE token’s value plummeted over 92% to $0.0032. In the following 90 minutes, the price dropped nearly 99.5%.
Before the attack, NORMIE was one of the top meme coins on Base, with nearly 90,000 on-chain token holders, according to DEXTools data.
Crypto hacks are no stranger to the digital currency community. However, the good news from April is that losses from hacks hit their lowest point since 2021, with $25.7 million lost and total damages in April dropping by 141%.
