8,000 Wallet ‘Solana Hack’ Unrelated to the Protocol or Its Cryptography

The Solana hack of 8,000 wallets and an estimated $4.5 million dollars is a tragic reminder of Web3 vulnerability, but it isn't a hack of Solana's protocol.

2022 has been something of a rough year for crypto, in case you haven’t noticed. Although there are a lot of positives, it’s hard to avoid the fact the industry has lurched from disaster to disaster. Well, to pile onto that, you may have seen “Solana Hack” trending just about everywhere. Is it as bad as it seems?

As is often the case with these things, “yes and no” is the answer. Yes, insofar as innocent cryptopians have lost an estimated $4.46m across 8,000 different hot wallets. No, insofar as it isn’t Solana as a protocol that has been hacked, backdoored, or exploited.

The issue was tracked down to Slope and Phantom wallets, with users finding their $SOL, $USDC, and other Solana-based tokens had been drained completely. In the last hour, Slope has released a statement on the breach. There isn’t much information, but they claim that some of Slope’s founders and staff have had their wallets emptied by the hackers. They also recommended that users, “Create a new and unique seed phrase wallet, and transfer all assets to this new wallet. Again, we do not recommend using the same seed phrase on this new wallet that you had on Slope.”

Meanwhile, over at Phantom HQ, they have immediately tweeted following the statement from Slope by airdropping the blame at their feet:

It is too early to say who is at fault, but I would like to stress to readers two key takeaways:

  1. No wallet, exchange, or protocol is immune to security breaches or hacks. This is a reminder to take security seriously, use a hardware wallet where possible, and not have too many eggs in one basket.
  2. The Solana protocol has not been hacked, its cryptography has not been exposed as flawed, and (so far, it seems as if) this had little to do with Solana at all, it just happened to be on that particular blockchain.

It’s another sad piece of news, and potentially dreadful for those affected, but to all the media outlets defecating on Solana, so far, they have little — if any — blame to shoulder.

Lead image by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash
Robert Baggs
Robert Baggs
Full-time professional crypto writer and Editor of Token Gamer. Co-host of the Mint One Podcast. Obsessed with MMOs. London based. Primary holdings: WAXP, ENJ, & BTC. Secondary holdings: ETH, GALA, & MATIC

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