It all started with a tweet that got very little attention. That is now Deleted. It was by 0xNietzsche and it read something like:
"For the next hours I will be making 300k/hour"
The account only had a few hundred followers, so it didn’t get many eyes on it or was disregarded as standard twitter talk. Little did we know that he had actually written a contract that was exploiting the Meebits mint contract, to get it to mint desirable Token IDs.
The whole operation was possible because there was a leak of the Token IDs. This was picked up by a few users and shared around.
Nietzsche then wrote a smart contract that would interact with the minting contract. He set up some desirable token IDs and started minting. When the token ID was recognized as a desirable ID he would then call to mint and transfer the NFT off the contract into his wallet. If the ID was undesirable then it would cancel and start again.
Here is a more technical explanation by NateAlexNFT
you'd then need to transfer it out of that contract to a wallet you owned. if the calculation gives an ID that is not in your approved list, the function simply reverts at the require statement and you try again in the next block.
— NateAlex (@NateAlexNFT) May 8, 2021
Nietzsche minted a Visitor Meebit which he listed for 200 ETH, which quickly sold to Pranksy.
1) Decorate dining room
— Pranksy 📦 (@pranksyNFT) May 8, 2021
2) Buy visitor #Meebit for 200 ETH after discord tagging
3) Crypto Twitter explodes after @larvalabs vulnerability found then halted and then article on @Cointelegraph
4) Sell visitor #Meebit for 299 ETH
5) Do washing up
Just another day in #NFTs pic.twitter.com/mJgDVvr1g6
The LL teams took quick action and stopped the party before any significant damage could be done.
After it all went down there was this post, referring to the deleted Tweets. I knew I should have screen grabbed that
Definitely sent out some regrettable tweets in the last few hours. After coming down & processing it all they do sound VERY douchey.
— hype.eth (@hype_eth) May 8, 2021
Definitely one of the first, and so far Top Meebit moments (pixls.eth needs to start documenting these too. ;) There has been a lot of positive and negative feedback from the community regarding this story. We did our best to present the incident with neutrality and we invite you to take part in the conversation and tell us what you think about this incident.
