A member of the Munchables team, allegedly linked to North Korea, stole more than $60 million in cryptocurrency from the project. However, the stolen funds were returned after the perpetrator was exposed.
On March 27, the gaming protocol Munchables, based in Blast, experienced a significant hack resulting in a loss of over $62.5 million in Ethereum (ETH).
The Munchables team acknowledged the possible involvement of one of their members in a post on X.
In a now-deleted Telegram post, blockchain expert ZachXBT identified an address associated with the hacker, mentioning that the attacker is a “DPRK IT Worker.” Following this revelation, Dan from Pixelcraft Studios disclosed that his team had interacted with the hacker in 2022 for game development work, expressing concerns about potential connections to North Korean hackers.
After the attacker’s identity was exposed, blockchain analysis identified several addresses linked to the hacker, some of which had interactions with centralized exchanges like Binance, MEXC, and ChangeNOW.
In response to the public disclosure of the attacker’s identity and subsequent investigations, the perpetrator decided to return all the stolen funds. The Munchables team verified that the attacker had agreed to return the funds with no conditions attached. They also mentioned that the individual responsible for the breach had provided necessary private keys to assist in recovering user funds.
Munchables is a new decentralized finance application focused on gaming (GameFi) operating on the Ethereum layer-2 network Blast. It enables players to access in-game items in the form of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) through crypto staking.
For more information, North Korea has set a new record for the number of crypto hacks in 2023, according to data. Additionally, the UN reports that North Korea earns 50% of its foreign earnings due to weak security measures in the crypto industry.