“The default is going to be, ‘Who did this, and why is it the devs?' ” Day says.Īs he tried to sleep the morning after the attack, Day realized he hadn't heard from one particular collaborator. Most crypto exploits are assumed to be inside jobs until proven otherwise. The question now was who'd launched the attack and whether they'd return the funds. Kellar apologized on Twitter to Indexed's hundreds of users and took responsibility for the vulnerability he'd failed to detect. On the platform's Discord and Telegram channels, token-holders traded theories and recriminations, in some cases blaming the team and demanding compensation. Kellar and Day stanched the bleeding and repaired the code enough to prevent further attacks, then turned to face the public-relations nightmare. Altogether, the person or people responsible had made off with $16 million worth of assets. It would take weeks to figure out precisely what had happened, but it appeared that the platform had been fooled into severely undervaluing tokens that belonged to its users and selling them to the attacker at an extreme discount. Indexed was built on the Ethereum blockchain, a public ledger where transaction details are stored, which meant there was a record of the attack. They pulled out their laptops and dug into the platform's code, with the help of a handful of acquaintances and Day's cat, Finney (named after Bitcoin pioneer Hal Finney), who perched on his shoulder in support. “All I said was, ‘What?' ” Kellar recalls. He picked up the phone to hear a breathless Day explaining that the platform had been attacked.
Kellar was sitting in his mom's living room six time zones away near Austin, disassembling a DVD player so he could salvage one of its lasers. Something was very wrong.ĭay jumped up, spilling his food on the floor, and ran into his bedroom to call Dillon Kellar, a co-founder of Indexed. But he knew enough to be alarmed: A user had bought up certain tokens at drastically deflated values, which shouldn't have been possible. “If you didn't know what you were looking at, you might say, ‘Nice-looking trade,' ” Day says. The colleague had sent over a screenshot showing a recent trade, followed by a question mark. The text was from a colleague who worked with him on Indexed Finance, a cryptocurrency platform that creates tokens representing baskets of other tokens-like an index fund, but on the blockchain.
On October 14, in a house near Leeds, England, Laurence Day was sitting down to a dinner of fish and chips on his couch when his phone buzzed.
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