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Due to a smart contract issue, the NFT project loses $34 million

Naris - Cryptocurrency Speculator –

While the crypto market exponentially grows, a smart contract problem has left the team with $34 million in inaccessible cash, putting the future of a much-hyped NFT project in jeopardy.

Akutars was a much-anticipated NFT project that was supposed to debut this weekend. Aku, an original character developed by former Major League Baseball player Micah Johnson, is the inspiration for the 3D avatar project. Only 5,495 of the possible 15,000 Aku NFTs were airdropped as free avatars to holders of the original Aku NFTs.

People who decided to buy Ethereum and hold it, could participate in a Dutch auction on Friday. Auction kicked off the sales, with prices starting at 3.5 Ethereum plus a 0.5 Ethereum discount for holders of an "Aku Mint Pass." Things, however, immediately began to go wrong. Following the launch, various developers contacted the Aku team to warn them that their smart contract may be exploited. Hasan, a Twitter user, attempted to alert the developers of the weakness, but was apparently dismissed on the grounds that the possible attack was a feature and that there were fail-safes in place to prevent it.

The smart contract was apparently programmed to allow mint pass holders to get a refund before the team could make any withdrawals. Multiple bids were not taken into consideration since the team expected that the minimum number of offers would be equal to the number of NFTs available for auction. Because some bidders attempted to mint numerous NFTs in the same offer, the contract's parameters were never satisfied, thereby locking about $34 million worth of Ethereum away forever.

Another user, USER221, chose to demonstrate the project's vulnerability by triggering the alleged issue. The anonymous person carried out a "griefing contract," which prevented the smart contract from processing reimbursements to underbidders.

USER221 added a note to his transaction requesting that the project "please perform bug bounty on [their] contracts, or at the very least have them audited." The guy also promised the Akutars crew that they will unlock the project in a separate blockchain transaction. Well, this was amusing; I had no intention of profiting from it. I wouldn't have used Coinbase otherwise. I'll remove the barrier as soon as you guys openly confirm that the exploit exists.

The Akutars dev team recognized the floor in a postmortem thread on Friday night, admitting that the anonymous individual's exploit "was not done out of malice" and that USER221 "wanted to call attention to appropriate procedures for very public projects."

Micah Johnson, the project's founder and former professional baseball player, apologised to the NFT community in another tweet the same day.

With the on-going growth of NFT’s and blockchain technology, cryptocurrencies are expanding enormously. Would it be smart to buy crypto right now? If you want to buy and sell cryptocurrency but are unsure of where is the best location to buy bitcoin or any other cryptocurrencies, you can visit BC Bitcoin to chat with a trusted cryptocurrency broker to get started right away.

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