AkuDreams, a highly anticipated NFT, has been affected by a smart contract bug. The smart contract bug exploited the smart contract that caused its auction to be disrupted and left them with a situation of not being able to access $33 million in funds.
The exploit and the smart contract bug affected the NFT project causing over 11,500 Ether worth $33 million to be locked in forever within the smart contract. The funds became inaccessible to even the dev team.
A costly smart contract bug
The exploit actually backfired when someone tried to prove a vulnerability in the contract and not steal funds through any hacks.
0xInuarashi, an NFT developer, took to his Twitter account to share the whopping $33 million smart xontract bug details.
He explained that the Akutars smart contract was designed in such a way that the refunds of the bidders had to be processed initially before the funds could be withdrawn from the contract by the team.
The flaw of the contract was that the contract had to pass a minimum number of bids to allow the team to withdraw the funds. But the minimum number of bids was set equal to the number of NFTs that were available for the auction.
But due to some buyers minting multiple NFTs in the same bid, the contract terms will be locked forever. This sealed the $33 million forever in the contract.
The team publicized the exploit as a feature
In what appears to be a deleted tweet, the Aku team completely neglected the exploit and labeled it a feature.
During the time of the mint, an individual exploited the contract which locked the contract’s ability to refund those who underbid. The individual also wrote a message to the Akutars team:
“Well, this was fun, had no intention of actually exploiting this lol. Otherwise I wouldn’t have used Coinbase. Once you guys publicly acknowledge that the exploit exists, I will remove the block immediately.”
The Kutars then wrote on their Twitter handle that the person was not trying to exploit the contract, instead, he was trying to bring attention.
The team announced on Sunday that the team rewrote its minting contract.