White Hat Helps Recover $2 Million from 2016 ICO Project

A pseudonymous white hat hacker helped recover $2 million worth of Ether locked in a faulty initial coin offering smart contract for almost a decade. The hacker, known as '0xflorent', recovered about 1,003 Ether from 48 investors who had participated in the Hong Coin (HONG) ICO, a decentralized venture capital fund that never launched after failing to reach its funding goal.

The contract held all the investors' ETH and was supposed to auto-refund them, but a bug in the refund function broke that and the funds got stuck. Etherscan shows one investor has been refunded 96 ETH, now worth about $192,500, while 0.5 ETH was returned to another.

Hong Coin was first pitched in 2016 with a video depicting a community-run venture capital fund; its ICO ran from Aug. 29 to Oct. 28, 2016, and investors were to receive 250 million HONG tokens across five stages but did not reach the funding goal and were to be refunded.

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