Partnered With:

"Rug Pull" Series NFT Auction Ending: Prisoner's Dilemma Did Not Take Effect, "Scientist" Takes Bitcoin

Read this article in 14 Minutes

I thought the game would last a long time.

From the new concept Gamefi to NFTfi, from Uniswap’s socks token “Socks” to “NFTweet”, emerging crypto artists can always use various methods to make NFT is more interesting and playable.

After introducing economic models such as game theory such as the prisoner's dilemma into NFT, some game projects are full of imagination. However, for crypto players For example, it may be necessary to take into account factors such as smart contracts or "scientists" that have not been encountered.

At the end of November this year, Robin Schmidt, founder of the well-known encrypted media The DeFiant, artist Simon Wan and the MEME team created an event called "The Rug Pull". The specific gameplay is that the organizer auctioned 12 NFTs, one of which contained 1 bitcoin—the value was only about 120,000 yuan at the time, but now it has risen to 220,000 yuan.

Theoretically, the probability of players getting bitcoins is 1/12, but if someone opens their own NFT, it means that the information of whether the NF has bitcoins will be made public. If Just happen to have bitcoins, that means other NFTs are worthless. This auction attracted a lot of attention. In the end, these 12 NFTs were successfully auctioned at a price of US$65,000 (paid in MEME tokens), and 12 players took away their NFTs.

The successful purchasers can choose not to open or conspire to open the bitcoin equally, but no one knows the result.

But only one month later, the follow-up progress of the auction was beyond everyone's expectations: a player named "RStudios" successfully took away the Bitcoin without needing to determine which NFT contained Bitcoin. This 1 bitcoin.

The final result is surprising, so how did this player take away this bitcoin that seemed to be "sealed" well? To find out, Rekt investigated the ins and outs of the whole incident and got a response from the organizer. The organizer believes that even if it did not meet expectations, it does not mean that the auction failed.

Successfully took 1 bitcoin

According to the official disclosure, 12 players paid funds ranging from 4,000 to 8.4 thousand US dollars in this NFT auction, and each got one of the works. As long as no one opens it, the value of an NFT work is at least equivalent to 1/12 of the BTC price.

But a problem that most people don't consider is : If you don’t need NFT, you can directly take the bitcoin in it? This loophole was discovered.

Let us follow the clues back to the day of the auction. On November 11, 2020, a player named "RStudios" appeared on Discord. RStudios has no official relationship with MEME, because his wallet address Data on the chain gives evidence: he has participated in other NFT projects, which can be seen on OpenSea.

After the auction, someone saw him say a sentence: Well, it seems that no one wanted to reply to me yesterday, the random number generator of this event has a vulnerability to be attacked (its an insecure RNG dice roll).

About a month later, on December 26th, the code was actually exploited. Here's an overview of the process for the day:

1. RStudios bought an NFT from a player of "y_kymin" at a price of 13,000 DAI (and bargained).

2. Immediately afterwards, he took away WBTC through a series of operations.

3. In the end, RStudios sold the NFT at a price of 1.7 ETH, making a total profit of 1WBTC and 1.7 ETH, and of course minus the 13,000 DAI he paid for the NFT.

Actually, Rstudios doesn't need to know which NFT has bitcoin in it , you can take bitcoins. Although this "attack" took him a few days, in his words: "It was not easy." Later, he also sold an "empty" NFT, which also caused controversy, and Rstudios said it would buy it back.

How to view this event?

From the above analysis, we can see that for players who bought NFT, they really suffered losses. However, the organizer insisted that everything was normal. Robin Schmidt, founder of The DeFiant, the sponsor of the event, said that such an "accident" did break their original plan and end the event prematurely.

But he believes that one of the 12 buyers sold his NFT, "breaking the recognized fragile circle of trust that has been established", "this proves what we all know: the chain's It is only as strong as its weakest link."

Another interesting question is that when Rstudios removed Bitcoin from NFT, he made it public, but if he concealed it , what will happen? Maybe the last 12 players couldn't resist opening it together and found it empty, or maybe the secret will always be kept.

But the real situation is: a seemingly perfect experiment with no loopholes was exploited by those who wanted to, and the biggest losses were the other 11 NFT players. And it seems that part of the reason for this ending can be attributed to the project initiator, and the players who participated in the game lost their assets.

In the ever-changing encryption world, such vulnerabilities are often defined as "experiments".