The team behind basic memecoin Normie (NORMIE) says it is negotiating with hackers to return 90% of funds stolen due to a smart contract vulnerability, resulting in a $41.7 million drop of the token’s market capitalization in less than three hours.
Blockchain analytics company Lookonchain was one of the first companies to discover the exploit, and the hacker exposed it in a chain message to Normie’s publishing address on May 26.
Normie later reportedly accepted the hacker’s offer to recover 90% of the stolen NORMIE tokens – although the price has already fallen 96% since the exploit – on the condition that Normie uses the stolen funds and 2.3 million dollars in the team’s development portfolio to launch a new token project to compensate NORMIE HOLDERS.
The hacker also demanded no retaliation in another post on the channel.
“We will have to relaunch, yes,” Nurmi’s team said in a new X account he apparently created after his main account was suspended.
“This will come after we get our main Twitter account back and after we get the money back from the exploiter,” Nurmi said at the time, although the temporary account was also suspended shortly after.
But the hacker doubled down on his strict conditions, emphasizing that a relaunch of the token must take place before the funds can be returned.
“The developer’s wallet generated far more profit than I did during this exploit, and I have no other way to ensure that these funds are used appropriately.”
Dinho, one of the administrators of the official NORMIE Telegram group, was unable to confirm when NORMIE token holders will be able to recover their stolen funds. Dinho X’s account was also suspended.
NORMIE’s price started falling at 3:55 a.m. UTC on May 26, and within an hour it had already fallen more than 92% to $0.0032, according to CoinGecko.
Apart from a short-lived price surge to $0.019, its price continued to decline to $0.0016 at the time of writing, registering a 96% decline.
Its market capitalization reached $200,000 after falling from $41.9 million, but has since recovered slightly.
about: $20 million exploit cripples Sonne Finance, hacker in no mood to negotiate
The team behind blockchain fraud detection tool Quick Intel claims that 72,000 NORMIE holders were affected by a vulnerability in the smart contract, discovered in March.
It’s unclear how much money was stolen during the ordeal.
NORMIE launched amid the recent memecoin craze on Base in March 2024 and reached a peak market cap of $130 million on April 2, according to CoinGecko.
A recent Cointelegraph survey found that 91% of underlying meme coins have vulnerabilities that could expose users to significant losses.
review: Should cryptocurrency projects negotiate with hackers? Maybe
