Optimism has been a hot mess since even before it launched 2 weeks ago (officially). The airdrop was pilfered by sybils going through the deployment contract for OP before it was officially announced and started actively dumping the token in multiples of $10,000 per dump.
I've been following Optimism closely because I knew I would be getting part of that initial airdrops and that more airdrops would be on the way for most people who had interacted throughout the EVM. Yesterday, I (luckily) sold all of my OP before news broke that Wintermute, a well-known and veteran market maker, had its old Gnosis safe multi-sig exploited, gutting the price of OP.
The response from the CEO of Wintermute, Evegny Gaevoy, on Optimism's governance forum is a good place to start digging through what exactly happened. TL;DR Wintermute fucked up HUGE.
This thread is just so juicy
Banteg, the bunny knight of Yearn, posted a thorough and succinct breakdown of how the exploiter was able to take over Wintermute's Gnosis Safe.
Essentially, someone did their due diligence and discovered that Wintermute had (stupidly) deployed their Gnosis safe multi-sig on ETH mainnet many versions ago in 1.1.1 Gnosis Proxy Factory and had used that SAME VULNERABLE AF wallet as the receiving wallet of a 20m OP loan from Optimism Foundation....WOW.... The Gnosis Safe deployed initially on mainnet was manipulated to now have the same address but on Optimism, stealing the tokens.
Wintermute told Optimism on May 30 there was a vulnerability with the wallet and (wrongly) assumed they were the only ones capable of recovering the funds now locked in that wallet.
This situation is unbelievably dire and Wintermute are on full damage control. They've publicly stated they will buy any OP back that the hacker might dump of their remaining stolen 19M OP tokens still in the exploiter address. They've gone so far as to say they're willing to view this as a white hat exploit as long as the exploiter doesn't dump the OP tokens they stole. They've given the exploiter one week before they threaten doxxing the exploiter and going to authorities and alternate routes.
And this has been your update on the Optimism news of the day ;)