Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution Optimism has detected and fixed a critical bug that would have allowed the repeated creation of ETH tokens.
The issue was first discovered and reported by developer Jay Freeman, who has since been awarded a $2M bounty.
Optimism, Ethereum’s fourth-largest layer-2 scaling solution by total value locked (TVL), recently identified and subsequently fixed a “critical bug” in its coding. The network got wind of the vulnerability last week after it was discovered and reported by whitehat hacker Jay Freeman – the developer behind the Cydia and Orchid Protocols.
News has it that the bug was unintentionally triggered by an Etherescan employee. This would have allowed for the infinite creation of ETH tokens by triggering a code on the contract holding ETH balance. As Freeman explained in a deep-dive blog post, the bug “would allow an attacker to replicate money on any chain using their ‘OVM 2.0’ fork of go-ethereum.” A similar explanation by t
