Vulcan Forged Hacked for $140 Million, Developers Refund Users

Vulcan Forged, an NFT platform built on the Polygon network, was hacked earlier this week leading to the loss of 4.5 million native PYR coins which amounts to $140 million. The platform is credited for the creation of several play-to-earn games including Vulcan Verse, Berserk, BlockBabies, Forge Arena, and Vulcan Chess. It also operates an NFT marketplace.

Upon signing up for the platform, users are provided with their own My Forge wallets which are used to trade and manage their digital assets. During the recent hack, at least 96 high-value wallets were compromised and the stolen coins accounted for approximately 9% of the 50 million total circulating supply. The hacker then sold the assets on other crypto exchanges.

The team behind Vulcan Forged took responsibility for the inconvenience that was caused to its users. They noted that user wallets were “semi-custodial” meaning that the failure to secure the private keys of users was also partly the fault of the developers. The platform will be looking into “removing the semi-custodial solution from the entire Vulcan ecosystem” moving forward in order to transition into a completely decentralized setup.

In response to the hack, Vulcan Forged also refunded the $140 million in digital coins that were stolen from users. “All My Forge wallets have been secured. Only a few needing PYR back,” the developers expressed in a tweet on Tuesday.

The reimbursement was sourced from the platform’s treasury, where crypto projects store assets in cases of crises such as this. The users were refunded in PYR and LAVA tokens. News of the hack led to the drop in PYR coins, declining by 34% to $21 on Monday. Since then, the price has been fluctuating as it somewhat recovered to $24 during European hours. At the time of writing, PYR is currently priced at $20.27 according to CoinGecko.

Sources: CoinDesk, Crypto Briefing