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(bright music)
- There is an absolute crime epidemic
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
in the cryptocurrency space.
(bright music)
If a founder just calls the police when a hack occurs,
they're really just wasting valuable time by doing so.
They call me in to get that money back.
(bright music)
It's best that I remain anonymous.
You don't always know who's doing the attacking out there.
It is incredible that if you do turn on the news,
you see breaking news,
someone stole $450 from the cash register
of the local 7-Eleven,
and on the same day,
someone stole $25 million from a protocol
and you'll never hear about it.
(bright music)
When someone steals money,
there is a time sensitivity to figuring out who did that.
Time really matters in this case.
They're gonna hide, they're gonna disappear.
(bright music)
People think it's not really real
because it's internet money or whatever.
This is real money.
It's real theft, it's real criminals.
It becomes, catch me if you can.
(gentle music)
- My guest today is Griff Green.
Who's the-
actually I can call you
the representative of the DAO, right?
- I mean, since it's a decentralised organisation,
I guess anybody's a representative of it.
I'm definitely in it and I know it pretty well.
Honestly, we were not prepared
to be the largest crowd-fund ever.
(bright music)
I see $160 million in this thing as a huge honey pot,
and I don't want it to get attacked.
(bright music)
I was originally a chemical engineer,
and I didn't really like that profession.
When 2009 came around
and layoffs came, I was like, pick me, pick me.
I really wanted to live my ultimate truth,
and discover what the truth is in the world.
And it's just feels like we're controlled
by so many stories.
How you're supposed to live, put your money in the bank.
I didn't trust the banks,
and I just felt that like
there's so much to see in the world.
I can explore other areas and see what I like.
(bright music)
This is the last time
I will be seeing Seattle skyline at sunset.
(bright music)
Goodbye Seattle.
(bright music)
I just lived in a van for a while and it's great.
I went full on hippie, right?
I'm rejecting society, I'm selling everything I own.
You go to a vegetarian like, yoga camp,
and you're gonna meet people that are like me.
I was living off physical gold and silver,
and my buddy was storing it under his bed
and he would cash it out,
and then wire money to me wherever I was in the world.
(bright music)
Because I didn't want to contribute to the banking system
that was causing so much pain in the world.
(bright music)
Especially post 2008,
there was just bad vibes, real bad vibes.
(bright music)
When I went to Thailand and had a Thai massage,
oh my god, I was blown away.
I loved it,
I loved it.
So, I became a massage therapist.
(bright music)
I actually had really nice clientele.
It's like $200 a massage,
but my wrists were starting to hurt (laughs)
and also I was not making that much money.
(upbeat music)
I saw a Trace Mayer video in 2011,
and I think Bitcoin was around $5
and I was like, this stuff is so cool,
it's like super cheap to transact.
(upbeat music)
And then it had with it, this like, anarchist vibe,
and so I traded $1,500 worth of gold,
and $1,500 worth of silver for $3,000 in Bitcoin.
(upbeat bright music)
Then Bitcoin was going up like 200%, 300%.
Just like, what is this stuff?
This is crazy.
And I ended up with 24K
and I was like, my God, I could live off this for two years.
(upbeat music)
And the more I read, the more value aligned I was.
(gentle music)
The biggest problem with banks is the top-down control.
They can freeze my accounts,
they can take the money that's in there.
You know, it's not really my money.
If I send a Bitcoin transaction to someone,
they're gonna get it.
No one can stop it, it's decentralised.
There's no one person or one group that you can go to
and say, turn off your computers,
and the Bitcoin will go away.
(gentle music)
I was obsessed.
Bitcoin hijacked my brain,
and I just couldn't think about anything else.
So, I ended up breaking up with my girlfriend,
because she was always wanting my attention
and all I wanted to do was learn more about crypto.
(gentle music)
- Bitcoin is definitely the original currency,
you can send and receive money, that's it.
And then Ethereum is very much seen as its main competitor.
- Ethereum was created
so that we could build smart contracts.
A lot of smart contracts work like a vending machine.
You send money in and you get something out,
and they have certain rules.
(gentle music)
You'd have to use Ether, the currency of Ethereum,
to make a smart contract do something,
whatever it's programmed to do, like a vending machine,
but a vending machine for anything.
- And once they're on Ethereum, what makes them unique,
is that they're no longer
under the control of the developer.
(rising music)
- [Green] I was looking into companies in crypto,
and Slock.it had someone
who was very tight in the Ethereum space,
with a lot of legitimacy,
Christoph Jentzsch.
- Hi, my name is Christoph.
- [Green] I was sending countless emails
to Christoph saying, please let me work for Slock.it.
- Griff Green contacted us.
He said, I love what you're doing, I would like to join.
For me, he looked like a funny hippie
who loves life and enjoys it.
- And eventually he replied,
he was like, sure, you can come work with us.
I was like, oh my God, it's so cool.
- We came up with the idea of Slock.it,
and Slock.it standing for like, smart lock,
or to Slock something with like the new wallet.
That means, to lock something up,
which you could open by a payment.
With Ether or an Ethereum channel,
I could give the machine something like a bank account,
so it could receive payments completely independently.
The humble lock or Slock.
A Slock can be used with an Ethereum contract
to open anything.
For example, this Slock powered door,
can provide access to an office or rental apartment.
I founded it together with my brother and Stefan Tual,
at the end of 2015.
- And in the beginning we just had the idea.
- As any startup, you need money.
I tried to look at the phone book,
called every VC I could find there.
Some of them gave me an appointment to pitch it,
everybody hated it.
Like there are other smart door locks out there,
what's better with yours?
Well, we are decentralised.
Okay, what benefit does this have for the customer?
Well, it works without us.
Okay, it was like, they didn't get it at all.
Like the VCs, no interest, didn't get it.
Only the ecosystem around Ethereum
could understand the value of such a thing.
So, maybe let's go into
raising from the ecosystem.
They're not VCs, so how to do it?
So, this is how it started.
- So, that's why we created the DAO.
DAO is a Decentralised Autonomous Organisation.
- The DAO was a venture capital fund, more or less.
- Simply a smart contract on Ethereum,
where you could send Ether to it,
and then you would get a token, just like a vending machine.
The more tokens you have, the more voting rights you have.
And all of the money that was sent to create those tokens,
stayed in that DAO,
in the smart contracts of the DAO,
it didn't go anywhere else,
and the token holders had control of it.
(bright music)
- The most important key
and that's the name of
Decentralised Autonomous Organisation is,
there is no hierarchy.
And this decentralised approach
means all decisions have to be made by all the token holders.
(bright music)
- This was the decision to note this global DAO.
This was aligned with the spirit and the ecosystem.
Nothing like this has happened before.
I will show you today how this D,A,O,
a Decentralised Autonomous Organisation will work.
We will do a presale,
we'll do a fundraising, like a crowdfunding,
and that's where we need your help.
And very importantly, you control the funds.
(slow dramatic music)
- In DAO there's a saying that code is law,
- Code is law. - Law is code, code is law.
- The idea of code is law, really encapsulated the DAO.
We're building a new legal structure with code.
(bright music)
If there's not a line of code that says you can do this,
then you can't do it.
- There's a strong idea of code is law
or, once the rules are set, they aren't changeable anymore.
The downside is, if you build something truly decentralised,
something that's truly unknown,
then that also means that there's no one who can fix it
if something is broken.
- So, you need a developer.
So, someone who could help me with writing the tests,
and setting everything up, there was so much work to do.
- Hey, I'm Lefteris.
They... hired Lefteris.
and then it was the five of us to start the DAO.
Me and Griff, we are quite different people.
(bright music)
Griff is extremely
excited about everything and he brings a smile to the room.
I'm extremely technical.
I like to be alone and code in a dark room.
Everything that had to do with code, it was passing through me.
Because it was a very small startup,
they had raised no other funding.
They were expecting to get paid by the DAO.
This was the first time that anybody does such a thing.
(bright music)
- We had creators for technical checks.
- I knew Christoph because I worked with him at Ethereum,
and one day he came up to me and said,
"Hey, do you want to be creator for the DAO?"
I was excited, I thought it was a great idea.
(tense music)
- We already had platforms to crowdfund,
but they were not the same
as having a decentralised venture fund.
You could be a VC,
without any financial barrier.
As a young 18-year-old trying to do startups in Portugal,
I had very little access to capital.
So, I just loved the idea.
(tense music)
- Everyone in Ethereum was excited about our project.
- In the beginning, not many people are using Ethereum.
2016 there were no applications,
there was nothing to do on Ethereum.
The DAO was the first
really interesting investment opportunity.
- We had about 5,000 people in Slack,
and I did feel a lot of pressure
and urgency to finally release.
And they're like, why are we not starting?
What is holding us back.
I was always saying the smart contracts
are not really done yet.
What's missing?
I just wanna have another look,
another look,
test, one more test.
Going after me and saying,
work faster, release it, release it.
(tense music)
And I remember, the point of no return.
I was sitting there and said,
well what are we doing here right now?
Like this is exploding, this is going viral
before it even started.
What am I doing here? Is this safe?
What can it lead to?
(dramatic music)
This is now the last moment that I could say,
stop, I'm not doing this.
If I don't do this now, I cannot stop it anymore.
- We had everyone looking at these contracts,
but no one had a formal training in smart contract audits,
because there were no smart contracts to audit.
- So, writing smart contracts
is very different from writing normal software.
If you write a normal app and there's a bug,
you just go ahead, fix on a server,
deploy a new version, be done with it.
But deploying a smart contract means,
it can never ever be changed again.
This is the final version.
Plus, it's available for the whole world to use.
Everybody can read it, it's completely public.
And usually developers would say,
it's almost impossible to write perfect code.
So, your attack scenario is immense.
(alarm beeping)
It took a lot of, for me, overcoming fear,
saying, well, I can somehow handle this.
At some point I just had to push the button,
well, there's nothing more I can do.
I have looked at it a thousand times,
I feel like there's nothing more I can do,
so let's release it.
(rhythmic music)
Then money was flowing into it.
(rhythmic music)
And this is then when the narrative changed.
(bright music)
We thought, well, we need a little bit of money
for having maybe 5 or 10 people for one or two years,
it would be 5 million.
- And that would be definitely sufficient
to build a product we want to build.
- And then the first million came in, we are like happy.
It works pretty quickly, the second million so,
that was quick.
But well, we expected the money to come in,
especially in the beginning.
So, then it was 5 million, 10 million.
- I was watching it, calling my other two friends
and saying that we really need to do this.
Like I was pitching it to them,
because like, the amount of money was spectacular.
- Now 20 million, it rose so quickly up.
And we put a few hundred ETH in there,
which was a few thousand euros,
and it was all that we had.
- I thought we would get 30,
and I was by far the most optimistic member of the team.
We had $30 million within the first few days.
- 30 million, 50 million.
- When they grow to that amount,
I thought, oh my god, what am I part of now?
- Yeah, I think 90 million was the point,
I had a meeting in Berlin,
I felt so uneasy about it.
There were people there,
congratulating me, it was a huge success.
I didn't feel like, happy at all.
- [Green] Christoph, when we raised a hundred million dollars
he actually physically vomited when he found out.
- He got scared.
Just because we didn't expect
those high numbers there.
- Man I was stoked.
Oh my God, are you kidding me?
It was like, it was a success out of my wildest dreams.
I couldn't even believe that much money existed.
At the time I was living in Seattle,
just hunkering down there with some friends,
and paying like,
$300 in rent,
and all of a sudden my project is raising
a hundred million dollars.
(tense music)
- The DAO ended up with $160 million worth of Ether,
and that was a point where,
it got kind of spooky for everybody,
you know, who was in there,
because nobody knew what would happen.
- But yet, it kept going up.
(upbeat music)
People got so excited about the DAO's success
that they started buying Ether.
- [DAO Member] And then the Ether price went also out.
So this was almost a quarter billion dollars worth of ether.
- Everybody could see that,
this is going to be the next big thing.
- It was super, super exciting.
We were investors.
We could call ourselves investors.
- Everybody wanted to talk about it.
(slow dramatic music)
I just actually hated this situation,
because it was too much responsibility for me.
I was just a young father of young kids.
I was not a business guy,
a manager of huge amounts of money.
I was not... It was not me.
Almost like a depression, like I would not talk to anybody,
I was just hiding in my home.
- I didn't get scared 'cause I'm not a software developer,
but Christoph, and Lefteris, and Simon,
they were scared outta their minds.
They've written code before with bugs, you know?
They know,
they know there's bugs.
They just don't know what they are,
but they know that there are bugs.
(tense music)
- The more and more money
that is secured by the code that you have written,
the more uncomfortable you start feeling.
The code that secures the smart contract
could have vulnerabilities.
It could be that,
there is something that we didn't think about.
- We had this enormous stress of,
we just did the largest crowdfunding in history.
- With so much money at stake,
it's just really scary.
- This is like a huge target
for any attacker.
- Felt exciting and dangerous.
So, we maybe got a sense that,
okay, that's very big, and what if something's wrong?
Which, funny enough, didn't take long to appear.
It took like just a few days,
after the money was in, that this attack started to happen.
(tense music)
- I woke up, checked on the Slack, because that was my job.
You know, you go to sleep, you look at the Slack,
you make sure everything's cool.
You wake up, look at the Slack, make sure everything's cool.
This is about six in the morning,
and everything was not cool.
(slow dramatic music) (notifications pinging)
You could see how much money it had,
and then you refresh the page
and then it starts to have less money.
I'm looking and like, oh my god, it is being drained.
Thousands of dollars was being drained every couple of minutes.
It shouldn't be possible, I knew instantly it was a hack.
(tense music)
I called everyone that I could,
but Simon was the only one who answered.
I told him, gotta get ahold of Christoph, ASAP,
like get him, like go to his house,
whatever, you know?
Knock on his door.
- I just called Christoph,
and at that time he was still sleeping
so I just had his wife on the phone.
I said, okay, maybe it would been good to wake him up.
- So, my wife was waking me up
and saying, my brother Simon is calling, it's really urgent.
So okay, I was waking up,
we're looking at the transactions.
My first thought was,
oh, someone is just taking out his money.
And then I looked deep into it.
Well no, he's taking out more than he put in.
And then I realised, this is not what I anticipated,
this is absolutely a hack,
and he's draining millions of dollars per hour.
My thought was, there's no way to fix this, that's it.
The DAO's over, completely over.
(tense music)
- I go to the office,
sitting down and then somebody came to me,
hey, have you seen what's happening on the DAO?
Suddenly you see all of these transactions,
and how the money's draining out.
Everybody panicking,
and selling, and everything's going crazy.
But at the same time, it was completely, like confusing.
Nobody had an idea what was happening.
(slow dramatic music)
- So, the first thing that we used to look at,
was the price of ether in the morning.
I dove right into the forums because it was tanking a lot.
- So, I crafted this message that said:
So, around $15 million every hour was being
drained out of the DAO.
- There is no way to stop this.
We have no control, we don't have any admin keys.
We cannot upgrade the code.
We got into the chat with Stephan asking like,
let's fix it,
and no, that's not fixed, DAO is over.
He was not believing it like, no, the DAO is over.
You can make a blog post, that's it.
(slow dramatic music)
Over.
I was so stressed, that I just needed to lay down.
There was a bedroom next to the office,
I was just laying on the bed.
- The amount of stress
that was on this man's shoulders was out of control.
He was losing it a little bit, let's just be real.
He needed to relax.
I'm a masseuse so I'm like, well hey,
let me give you a massage and calm you down.
- And he just came to me and tried to calm me down.
There was still no, like end of this in sight,
and I was giving everything I could.
- Rubbed his arms and his shoulders a little bit,
just to like, get him to relax, because man,
it was a... it was one of the toughest days of his life.
(tense music)
- Nobody including myself, had seen this vulnerability.
- All the eyes that looked at it, had not seen this.
It became obvious what it was quite early on.
(code pinging)
- The DAO hack was actually very complicated.
- It is like, saying I want my money out,
that's the function.
The bug in the code,
was that he did not just take his money with him,
but way more than this.
Just pretending to just take his money out,
but in a way, that the books were not updated correctly,
so he could do it again, and again, and again, and again.
- So, we're talking literally about,
two lines being flipped in the wrong order.
You flip them around, the system is safe,
you flip them this way around, the system is not safe.
(tense music)
- So, he recalled the same function
many, many, many times.
You just look at it and can't do nothing.
I thought, well this just continues until it's empty.
So, we can make some meetings, we can discuss it
and even during the meetings the money got drained.
It's like a very weird feeling like we are discussing here,
and the DAO is getting drained
at a rate of $50 million dollars per hour.
(tense music)
- It was happening for several hours,
it felt like an eternity.
- At that moment he stopped.
- About 70% was still left inside the DAO,
and then it just stopped, and there was silence.
No one knew why he stopped, right?
He could have continued that.
- We have no idea,
why did the hacker stop?
The price of Ether started to crash.
By the end of it all the hacker took around 30% of the funds
that DAO was holding,
which ended up to be about $50 million dollars.
- $50 million missing out of the smart contract.
Now, this money was gone and nobody knew where it is,
and who did it.
(brooding music)
- I decided to sell all my DAO tokens
for a third of their value.
Because they were heavily, heavily deflated
because of the attack that had just happened.
That bright future of investors that we were counting on,
had just 'poofed' in a second.
(tense rhythmic music)
I was somewhat disillusioned with myself,
but I was also angry 'cause I lost money (laughs)
and I made my friends lose money.
- Christoph and Slock.it were devastated.
This new endeavour that helps everybody
now turns out to be a disaster.
- For me it was the relief
that this part of my life is now over.
But then of course the shock, people losing money.
I thought I would, I dunno if I would go to jail,
or if my name was ruined forever.
Nobody would hire me again as a developer after this bug.
(tense music)
- There was a community
that actually felt that the DAO hack wasn't a hack at all.
They were following code is law,
and a bug in the code,
well that's a loophole in the law.
- There were people in the community
who started saying that he did nothing wrong,
and that he just followed the rules of the smart contract.
That intentions do not matter, that the code is the law.
I thought that these people are stupid.
- We did say so, we pushed it on our website, code is law.
And that's how
all the Ethereum applications have been built.
There was no room for legal discourse,
and so, I fully understood the voices who were saying,
well, code is law.
What just happened happened,
and there's no reason to talk about a solution
because that's what the code said,
and he just executed code as it's supposed to.
I think the hacker, those who lost money due to him,
they can sue him, and that's good reason.
He acted like, against the intent of this contract.
But there were people saying no, shouldn't happen.
There are no lawyers or law enforcement involved, no police.
You would think, if you build something,
and you lose $50 million of some other people's money,
you would get a lawyer.
And we didn't,
and there was nobody suing us.
- But the fact of the matter is a lot of people were hurt.
Real people are hurt.
Code is not law, code is code.
Everyone was like, all of a sudden in a constant fight,
and it just destroyed our culture.
- I think it's safe to to call it a tragedy
of epic proportions for the DAO.
And I know that the last 24 hours
have been a wild ride for us spectating.
You can only imagine how difficult it has been
for the team behind the DAO,
in particular, our man Griff Green.
Where are you at right now?
- I'm at, in Mittweida Germany,
actually at Christoph's mom's house,
based in Mittweida for now until,
well, we were hoping to work for the DAO,
but unfortunately that doesn't seem very likely now.
(gentle music)
- Must have been a very rough last 24 hours.
(gentle music)
- When I saw the hack, I was first, of course shocked.
I have no idea how we can fix the situation,
and I lay on the ground taking a deep breath.
And I did pray to God,
and know that he can help me through this.
In that moment, I really did not see the exit.
But I've God at my side, ask my wife,
I owe it to them,
to at least give everything I can
to fix whatever I can fix,
and after I've done everything I can,
then I, at least, know it's over.
(gentle music)
- After the initial feeling of shock,
so I just thought, okay,
what can we do, in order to fix this?
- Griff was actually excited.
He wasn't happy about it.
He's just always a happy person, but it was like, action.
(upbeat music)
- I was enthused.
I mean it was a tragic thing,
but like there was so much to do.
I was energised by the
opportunity to really take action.
Even though it was horrible,
it was one of the best times of my life actually.
Once the hack stopped, I mean first off that was scary.
We didn't know when it was gonna start up again,
or if it would.
We know that 70% of the money that's left in the DAO,
over a hundred million dollars, is still at risk.
We have to figure out how to save it, how to get it out.
Then the urgency started.
'cause then it was like, well we can maybe do something.
If he got something out, the rest of it is still there.
Let's try to figure out how he did it.
- It was all action.
I honestly don't know what I was feeling.
It was just movement.
I couldn't think outside of,
what are we doing right now?
(upbeat music)
Lefteris, he was instantly focused on
how do we actually recreate the hack?
Can we recreate it, so we can rescue the rest of the funds?
- You need to be able to replicate what the attacker did.
I had to be completely alone.
I just had to sort everything out,
focus on the code,
and figure out if there is anything that we can do
in order to save whatever remains inside of the DAO.
- Lefteris, lemme just say,
incredible, incredible work,
yesterday and today, just coming up with attacks.
I don't think he left his computer for 20 hours straight,
just attacking, the dedication.
But we were able to recreate the attack,
and figure out what happened.
(tense music) (keyboard clacking)
- I managed to replicate the attack within a few hours.
That meant that anybody else could do exactly what I did,
and do a copycat attack on the DAO at any moment,
and drain the rest of the funds.
- There is a bug,
and anyone in the world could repeat
what the DAO hacker just did.
Luckily, we were able to
be one of the first people to recreate it.
- And then immediately,
was the question what do we do with it?
Like, should we attack the DAO in the same way?
Just imagine, you're seeing a hundred million dollars
laying in front of you.
You know it belongs to someone else,
but everybody can take it.
If you are honest, you should think to yourself:
I can take it and give it to the police,
and they can try to find the owner.
If I don't do it, someone else might do it.
So, this was the weird situation.
(tense music)
- What if we start attacking the DAO?
Is that okay?
Is that legal?
(tense music)
- Slock.it wanted to stay out of any such thing,
because there are a lot of legal questions.
- So, then the so-called Robin Hood Group formed,
they have all my support,
but we could also not do it as a company,
and that's where now Griff came into play.
- It's kinda like black ops, you know?
We weren't stealing from the rich
and giving to the poor.
We were stealing from this vulnerable smart contract,
and making sure that it would get back
to the DAO token holders.
But it's catchy, and we're gonna steal a bunch of money,
and give it back to the people.
(tense music)
We had to bring in a rag-tag group of hackers, right?
So, of course Lefteris was there.
We also invited Fabian.
They actually had a lawyer in my kindergarten,
and he told me like, dangerous, you can't do this,
and this is like you shouldn't do, la la la.
But there was no other choice really,
because that money could have been gone
within hours after that,
and luckily enough there were other people
that thought the same,
but we were a very small group of people.
(tense music)
- Are we the same as the DAO hacker if we do this,
like, are we gonna go to jail,
even if we have the intention of giving it back?
- Is it a crime?
We had so many questions,
and no one could actually provide answers to them.
There was a lot of pressure from the community
to do something.
- We have to figure out
how to protect the rest of this money,
and make the best outcome that we can.
(tense music)
Fabian, Lefteris, and I were all getting together.
They started running drills,
and seeing how fast they could hack test DAOs.
(tense music)
- We were repeating the same attack,
over and over on copies of the DAO,
trying to understand how can we make it as fast as possible.
- You see all these ones and zeros,
and numbers going across the screen.
It's literally looks like the matrix, you know?
We're day and night working, nonstop.
I have 37 different slack chats
that I need to answer tonight, and I'm so sorry to everyone.
I don't sleep man, and that's how we all are.
Lefteris has been analysing this code for 48 hours straight.
I just, I mean I don't know if he slept at all.
(tense music)
- There was a second attack happening.
If we don't do something,
they will take all the money out of the pot,
and we have to act very quickly.
- We were afraid, and by we meaning me,
because I had to push the button.
The moment that we decided that okay,
it's time to do it, I just pressed the button.
(upbeat music)
- First one person started, then we started,
then seven, eight other DAO hackers
started attacking the DAO all at the same time.
(upbeat music)
And when those other attacks started happening,
we knew what to do, 'cause we were already trained up on it.
- This was a race.
There were more copycats coming up,
and they were attacking the DAO, and draining it.
We had to drain the DAO faster,
and save as much of the funds as we could.
(upbeat music)
- We started with just like a hundred thousand dollars,
that we would take out in every transaction.
And when we didn't see any issues,
we upped it to 300,000,
and then we upped it to a million dollars.
So, our second hack was pretty quick.
(upbeat music)
It was a war room, you know,
and they call it war room for a reason.
It is chaos, it is brutal.
There's no time to eat,
there's no time to go to the bathroom, you just have to go.
We were able to take around $95 million,
but there was still a lot of other hackers going at it.
One of 'em got around $3 million,
and then there were a lot of smaller ones.
There were actually a lot of people
trying to hack the DAO in that moment, that got nothing.
- By the end, once it was over, we were really happy,
and immediately we were wondering,
okay, now what do we do?
- It was a very intense moment.
I was happy that it was over. (laughs)
(soundtrack boom)
- I decided to not speak about it in public.
(ominous music)
I was really afraid of any repercussions.
I didn't want anything bad to happen to me or to my family.
- There is absolutely a fear that,
oh my god, we have control of a hundred million dollars.
The easiest hack,
doesn't have to do with smart contracts at all.
It's called the wrench attack.
When someone comes to your house with a wrench,
and says, "gimme all your money", right?
(ominous music)
Actually, everyone made us out to be heroes.
So like, oh thank god the Robin Hood Group did it.
Everyone trusted us,
and felt confident that we are the good guys,
and then we started doing the accounting,
and figuring out how to give everyone's money back.
(tense music)
- I had been learning about hacking
since I was eight or nine.
Just the fact that I didn't care enough,
to even do the slightest review on this code
prior to pitching this to my friends actually hurt me.
So, I was gonna start hacking stuff myself.
I started looking into all the other projects,
and I started trying to break them before anyone else did.
Hacking is not inherently bad.
To me, hacking is very much like lock picking.
The thing that I get from it is more, like solving a puzzle.
Sometimes it used with nefarious intents,
sometimes it's not.
That's the distinction between a black hat,
and a white hat hacker.
Black hat hackers in the crypto space actually steal money,
versus a white hat hacker,
which is someone that has good intentions,
to save funds from being stolen.
You're trying to exploit it, before someone else does.
(tense music)
- I got fully into looking at Ethereum.
At the time, the DAO hack was a year and a half old.
There were still plenty of discussions that were happening
about the code is law aspect in an attack.
The DAO was the first of its kind,
and it ended in a disaster.
But people were still interested in
decentralised organisations.
They wanted to participate in them,
they wanted to create them.
That wasn't affected
by what had happened.
- And one of the major trends
that we started seeing was DeFi, decentralised finance.
Picking up the financial instruments
that we could find in Wall Street,
and making versions
to be put on top of Ethereum.
What we're changing with DeFi,
is that,
we don't need to trust a third party.
You are not trusting humans.
It doesn't stop on weekends,
and it's all code.
It's all smart contracts that live on Ethereum.
So, DeFi has become really big,
and with it, Ethereum.
(upbeat music)
We now have protocols that are at 10 figure mark,
billions of dollars being deposited into them.
- But the term protocols is used in decentralised finance.
Protocol or set of rules,
for say, swapping assets or borrowing and lending,
which isn't going to be controlled by a company.
(upbeat music)
For the average Joe, they've got some crypto assets,
which, up until decentralised finance are effectively idle.
When DeFi comes along,
suddenly you can put these assets to work.
- I was just reaching out to projects,
to help them figure out
if they could have any vulnerabilities.
Me, and a couple more people
started offering these services.
We started charging for them,
and we've secured funds in the order of dozens of billions.
Black hat hackers have been innovating.
So, black hats have more and more tools at their disposal,
and the white hat hackers do the same,
to actually stop the attacks in their tracks.
(tense music)
- I started speaking to Dillon Kellar,
who was the founder,
and author of the Indexed Finance Protocol.
- The idea was to give people a way to invest
in the cryptocurrency space as a whole,
rather than specific assets.
In traditional finance,
people invest in index funds
because it's a more stable way
to get exposure to the economy as a whole,
without having to invest in particular assets.
Where the S&P 500 tracks
some of the top 500 assets in the stock market,
Indexed Finance was supposed to track,
some of the top performing assets
in the cryptocurrency space.
(brooding music)
- Smart contracts underpin the Indexed Finance protocol.
They perform the tasks
that humans would be expected to do,
in order to keep these things running.
I'd spent a bunch of time working in banking,
and I agreed to help out with explaining stuff.
- It's really rare to have somebody show up
in your community like that,
and be so interested in your protocol,
that they're willing to just help you.
I asked him if he would quit his job,
and work on the project.
He had a stable job,
and a wife, and a house that he had to pay a mortgage on.
- It's weird to say that,
working on something that replicates an index fund
is an exciting thing to do, right?
But it was, to me,
that eventually I turned around and said, tag me in.
Before the Indexed Finance Protocol went live,
there were security audits.
To hunt out vulnerabilities,
the code was presented to two security researchers,
who have a reputation in the field.
One of them is Daniel Luca.
(gentle music)
- I was one of the people that audited the code,
before it was impossible to change the rules.
I spent two weeks checking out the code,
spending time with Dillon,
trying to understand if it can be exploited in any way.
(tense music)
I'm the last person that checks the code
before people start adding
tens of millions of dollars in it.
(tense music)
You should always be afraid.
(tense music)
We did discuss a critical part of the code.
We weren't initially super sure that it's safe.
There are some parts in code that if that goes wrong,
if it doesn't work well, the system is manipulated,
and the whole thing explodes.
(tense music)
I check the same 10 lines of code for two, three days,
'cause it seemed like maybe something was there.
Dillon said that he thought about it quite a lot,
and he thinks everything's fine,
and I agreed to it.
(tense music)
- I'm super happy to have Dillon on the podcast,
as it's currently
one of the fastest rising projects in the DeFi space.
- Then about an hour,
I think like $30,000 had been deposited.
Suddenly, my heart just started racing,
so, I was so,
I was like, oh man, what if-
What if I messed something up in the contracts?
I got it audited, but you know, I really need to be sure,
so-
'Cause I hadn't launched anything previously
that had actually held any significant amount of money.
(tense music)
- When people started depositing money,
I suddenly got really worried about,
how well I had written the code.
I went back and looked at all of the code,
trying to reassess it,
but as it kept growing, it turned more into excitement.
(bright music)
It went from being like a few tens of thousands of dollars,
to pretty quickly, getting into the millions.
(bright music)
- The Assets belonged to thousands of individual people.
The average value across those wallets was, $2500.
- At its peak,
it had about $70 million in the protocol,
and that felt good.
It's also scary.
- The worm appears in your mind,
like this is a lot of money.
(bright music)
I think I was just doing what anyone does
around 7:00 PM in the UK in October.
(bright music)
We'd gone out and picked up a takeaway.
We'd sat down, we'd put stuff on a plate.
The dog was sitting next to us,
(bright music)
and my phone completely detonated next to me.
(bright music) (phone buzzing)
They were messages, just question marks,
and links to transactions,
and it's just, what is this?
(music impact)
It's dawning on me, within three or four seconds.
Something has just gone drastically wrong.
(phone buzzing)
All that I was looking at,
at that moment was,
an attack that,
was resulting in 12 and a half million dollars gone.
(phone buzzing)
I felt blind panic. (tense music)
I stood up like a shot.
I had food on my lap just crash to the floor,
(plate smashing)
broke the plate.
It's terror heroin. (phone buzzing)
(tense music)
This gut wrenching, sickening feeling.
(dog eating)
I was maybe three steps out of my chair,
and I was making a call to Dillon.
(ominous music)
Couple of rings,
5, 6, 7 interminable rings.
(ominous music)
- It was around noon,
and I was just hanging out in my living room.
(ominous music)
I had recently gotten a bit of an interest
in playing around with electronics,
trying to take apart a
DVD player to take a laser out of it.
(ominous music)
I didn't have my phone with me.
Eventually I heard the phone ringing,
so I went into my room.
(ominous music) (phone buzzing)
And, I saw Laurence was calling me.
(tense music) (phone buzzing)
We didn't usually have phone calls and
mostly talked over text so,
when I saw that he was calling,
it's kind of immediate panic.
(tense music)
- He finally picks up, but at that point, you know,
my voice is already breaking over the phone.
Indexed has been attacked.
Those were the only words that we shared.
(tense music)
- It was 10:00 PM,
I was scrolling through Twitter,
and I saw a tweet
that something happened to Indexed finance.
I messaged Dillon right away. (tense music)
- The discord server,
where everyone was conversing had just completely detonated.
(tense music)
Everyone, question marks, links, what is going on?
What's happening?
(tense music)
I had said, no, the assets are not safe.
The reaction from everyone was,
the fury, and anger,
and disappointment that you would expect.
(tense music)
This is actually quite hard to re-live.
I was receiving death threats, nearly immediately,
and at a pretty heavy rate.
(tense music)
I spent hours just shaking,
while trying to at the same time, work on a response.
We started forming
what we call the Indexed Finance war room.
(tense music) (keys clinging)
- I was trying to just suppress the immediate panic
that I was feeling.
Daniel and I were trying to understand,
exactly how the attack had happened.
(tense music)
- This was the...
single hack that happened to something I audited,
but it's not the right time to start doubting yourself then.
I spent about four hours from 10:00 PM to 2:00 AM,
going through everything.
It was not a normal hack.
(tense music)
- Just trying to load the transaction on my browser
caused my computer to freeze,
because there were thousands of transactions.
(tense music) (software clinging)
- There was a lot of frustration in the war room.
Also the lack of sleep after a few hours,
but there's a lot of adrenaline
that keeps you going till we had some kind of breakthrough.
(tense music)
- This attack involved buying huge amounts
of a particular asset,
way over what would be economically sensible.
(tense music)
The way that the attack was executed,
introduced a price glitch.
The protocol is assuming that,
people that are interacting with it,
are going to be rational.
If you flood the contract with these irrational actions,
the whole thing's just thrown completely into chaos.
(tense music)
- I already had looked into
this particular aspect of the code,
and I had failed to
identify the vulnerability there.
(tense music)
I should have caught this.
(tense music)
He was able to steal about $16 million.
(tense music)
- So, theft from all of the users
that have deposited assets into this protocol,
these assets are now gone.
They were now sitting in a
wallet controlled by an attacker.
(tense music)
- I was the only person who wrote the smart contracts
and so, it's on me to get that right.
(atmospheric music)
I didn't want Laurence or anyone else to be blamed for it.
I posted on Twitter saying,
"I have to personally take responsibility for this one.
I fucked up.
I'm extremely sorry to everyone
who lost money because of a mistake I made 363 days ago.
I haven't thought of this function
more than a handful of times this entire year,
and now people have lost about $16 million because of it."
(rising music)
(tense music)
- People tend to contact me
when there is a big hack happening,
because of the experience
that I have had dealing with the DAO and the aftermath.
(tense music)
So, since Laurence was a friend of mine,
we ended up in a war room together in order to,
try and figure out what is happening
and how we can probably help.
(tense music)
It felt quite personal to me.
(tense music)
It became obvious quite early that the hacker was smart,
but didn't know how to cover their tracks.
- The attack itself told us
a couple of things about who we were working with.
As a piece of engineering, it was incredibly well-crafted.
(tense music)
The other thing it told us,
was the attack address
had been constructed in such a way,
as to include a hate symbol.
(tense music)
- And then looking at the smart contract that he used
to actually perform the attack,
there was the N word just sprinkled all throughout it.
(tense music)
- I think at that point we worked out that,
they weren't to be reasoned with.
(tense music)
It was about seven in the morning.
I finally, you know, crawled up the stairs into my bed,
and I put my head down on the pillow.
And I realised at that point
that there was one person that I hadn't heard from,
and it was someone that I'd actually been speaking to,
in some depth for the last couple of weeks.
(tense music)
I did this, I just went...
that motherfucker!
I was like, he hasn't said anything.
I've heard people from things
that I hadn't spoken to in two years.
Where the fuck is Umbral Upsilon?
And I opened up to the conversation tab with this guy,
username Umbral Upsilon.
(tense music)
(phone clings)
And all of the chat had been deleted from his side,
and I was like, immediately up.
I was just like, fuck this right? (laughs)
Back to my machine.
(tense music)
Just in a rage, like an absolute second wind,
I'm sitting there going, right, you,
I'm finding everything about you now.
(tense music)
So, this collaborator
had been speaking to both Dillon and myself
for the last couple of weeks.
(tense music)
- He was trying to make a bot for the protocol,
to automate certain actions.
We were actually pretty excited about that,
because having a developer show interest
in what you're working on, and offer to help is pretty rare.
- A couple of days prior to the attack,
he had been paid 2000 US dollars as a half upfront,
for producing this code,
and conversation ceased at that point.
The assumption was that,
he was, just going off and finishing writing his code.
Normally, you consider the idea
of someone who's performing an attack
as just being a faceless adversary.
(tense music)
I think the moment that I realised
that his side of the conversation was gone,
in my guts, I knew.
It's you, how do I prove it?
(tense music)
I started just talking to people, asking questions,
and shortly thereafter I received a message
from a white hat,
saying there's an address that's tied to this account,
a Twitter user with the handle ZetaZeroes.
(ominous music)
This is our first point of contact,
that's demonstrably connected to the attack.
I didn't think through,
really what it was that I'd sent him,
because I was exhausted.
(ominous music)
I just wanted to appeal to him to say,
you know, well done, there should be a bounty for this,
but it should not be the entire amount that you've stolen,
these are not Indexed Finance's funds to give,
they belong to the user.
- We told him if he took 10%
and sent the rest back,
we, the team aren't gonna come after you any further.
He would've made $1.6 million.
(ominous music)
He did not take that offer.
- Over the next day or so, we started digging a lot harder,
and we started gathering a lot more clues,
as to the identity of our attacker.
We updated the terms of the bounty.
(ominous music)
You have until 5:00 PM tomorrow to return funds,
or we will involve law enforcement.
(ominous music)
Shortly after we posted these updates,
the ZetaZeroes' Twitter account became active.
What followed was a storm of about a dozen tweets,
that were completely indignant.
You have been out-traded,
I have outmanoeuvred you at every turn.
This is a skill issue, tough luck.
A rephrasing of code is law.
If the code permitted it, I'm allowed to do it,
and laws be damned.
(tense music)
- When he quoted the code is law idea,
and tried to garner support about this,
just like back with the DAO,
there were people who supported the idea.
(tense music)
- People lionising him,
and cheering him on for what he'd done, calling him a king.
(soundtrack boom)
- I personally felt the echoes of the DAO calling back,
and as if a ghost that we beat,
like put in an ancient tomb,
and put it there in order for it to stay hidden,
suddenly had come up with a vengeance.
(atmospheric music)
- Code is law is essentially saying,
that laws shouldn't exist,
but you have to have consequences
for people hacking projects.
You're never gonna have software that's perfect.
You can't have something that's separated from society,
where there are no laws, and,
where any action is permissible.
- Normally, when DeFi acts happen,
the attacker effectively disappears into the void.
Between our own investigative work,
and the help of others that were chipping in
with things that they knew,
we had started noticing a bunch of pieces.
We had lots of threads to start pulling at,
to find an identity.
The thinking here was,
pulling up threads and the attacker will realise
that the game is up,
and be coerced into returning funds.
(tense music)
I was looking for this conversation
with Umbral Upsilon, the guy who I had been speaking to,
and I noticed that there's been a name change.
The user is now known as Bogholder.
(tense music)
- Someone saw the name Bogholder,
and recognised this person,
and they are associated with a different username.
That username was mtheorylord.
We just searched for the username,
and looked for profiles on different websites
and we found one on Wikipedia,
that had posted some small changes
to various Wikipedia pages.
And one of those was to a competition called,
"Reach for the Top".
It was a Canadian trivia show for high-school students.
(tense music)
The nature of this edit that had been made,
was that, "Reach for the Top"
has a section called Notable alumni.
It includes names like Steven Harper,
previous Prime Minister of Canada.
And the edit that user mtheorylord had made,
five years prior to this, was a name.
Andean Medjedovic.
Next to his name was the two word descriptor,
notable mathematician.
- I think it showed that
this person was hilariously arrogant
and full of themselves,
to go and edit a Wikipedia article
to call themselves a notable mathematician.
So, at this point we started getting pretty excited.
- I was like, I fucking nailed him to a wall. (laughs)
I genuinely at that point,
like I ran around the park,
because I was like, yeah fuck yeah! (laughs)
(tweet clings)
I posted a tweet,
"Are Canadian prisons any good?"
(tweet pings)
This was meant as a message that,
we knew where he was.
We searched the name Andean Medjedovic,
we saw a search result on Google,
for, what was pretty clearly a personal website.
It was down, but Google Archives, most websites,
you can still look at the website,
and see what was on it before.
- It had an email address for him,
and importantly at the bottom it included a sentence,
that said that he'd also... was interested in cryptocurrency,
and other decentralised technologies.
Pro, one of the co-founders of Indexed Finance
sent an email to this address, saying, "You have been caught,
the game is up,
but I will offer you 50,000 US dollars,
in order to return the tokens."
The response that Pro received was a line that said,
sounds like a plan, send it to this address,
the address that we had originally paid $2,000 for work,
performed on the arbitrage bot.
This connected Andean Medjedovic to Umbral Upsilon.
(slow dramatic music)
- Now we had a direct link.
I couldn't really believe that he had done that.
- It's surprising he made a blunder like this.
Careless, sloppy, stupid.
(ominous music)
At this point I am euphoric.
This does not happen in cryptocurrency hack cases.
It felt deeply personal at this point.
He's holding the assets that he's stolen,
but we are holding his full identity.
At this point, I feel like surely he's gonna give up.
I mean, we know who he is.
We told him the offer is expired,
and the attacker who, at that point, we had not named,
had until midnight to return
100%, all of the funds that he had taken,
or else we were going to publish that information,
and reach out to law enforcement.
(ominous music)
- At this point we are thinking
that the attacker is a highly educated mathematician,
you know, mid-twenties, intelligent.
Sloppy, but intelligent.
The math work was impressive that we found on his website.
It sounds very impressive to be the kind of guy
who can do blindfolded chess,
but we'd found him,
and the thinking was at this point
that he would've just crumbled.
- This wasn't gonna be nearly as bad as we thought.
We'd be able to give everyone their money back.
(suspenseful music)
- The response came quickly
from the ZetaZeroes account.
- He reacted by complaining that we were doxxing teenagers.
Doxxing is when,
you publicly expose someone's information.
- We thought, this isn't a teenager,
there's no way this is a teenager.
And I think a seed of doubt
had started to appear at that point,
that, wait, have we got this wrong?
(tense music)
With a couple of hours to go before that deadline passed,
we received a message that said, the website's back up.
There was a link to a CV.
We opened it up,
and we are looking at a date of birth,
that makes this kid 18 years old.
(dramatic music)
He was significantly younger than we thought.
- On one hand I thought,
even if he's 18, he is still very intelligent,
and he is doing hacks on
protocols for millions of dollars,
and he's responsible for his actions.
But, on the other hand, it also means that he's a kid.
I wanted to give him another opportunity
to get out of this, without destroying his life.
(tense music)
I sent him a text message to his phone number
that was on his resume.
(atmospheric music)
(messages clinging)
- The message that was received was,
effectively a series of laughing emojis,
and the words, good luck.
- Just seeing that he was laughing at,
the attempt to get him to back off.
- We were clearly dealing with someone
who was not willing to negotiate or return things,
and so the options that we had left,
armed with an identity, was to take it to the legal system.
(message clinging)
At the same time that we were thinking about this,
Andean was clearly thinking the same thing.
There was one final rage post that came from him,
that said that he was willing to defend himself to the death
on this point of code is law,
and that he was looking to assemble
the most elite team of crypto lawyers to defend this.
- We spoke to our attorney Jason Gottlieb.
(atmospheric music)
Jason emailed Andean, imploring him to give the money back.
- A week later he received a response email
from another attorney,
(message clinging) (atmospheric music)
who had referred to Mr. Medjedovic as his client.
- His lawyer replied,
essentially saying that that wasn't gonna happen.
- Over the course of the next couple of weeks,
we set about filing a case in Canada.
It would be one of the first pieces of settled case law,
that finally established once and for all, code is not law.
Just because there was a method for someone to walk in,
and take everything does not necessarily mean
that was okay to do.
(tense music)
The case after it was filed was assigned
to a Canadian judge,
Judge Justice Fred Myers.
What we needed to do was to get the assets
that had been stolen into the custody of a neutral party.
- That's difficult in this case,
'cause unlike in a normal lawsuit,
you can't just order a bank to freeze the assets.
You need the consent of the person
who has the assets already.
- Medjedovic did turn up to a hearing with the judge.
(tense music)
He did not turn the camera on.
He did not speak.
But he was told by the judge
that if he did not participate in the process,
that he would be held in contempt of court.
(tense music)
One of the things that I found I think most upsetting...
Oh, I dunno where this came from.
I think one of the things I found most upsetting was,
looking at this guy's history, and his research interests,
and the work that he'd done,
was the similarities between the two of us.
I was also a pure mathematician at an undergraduate level,
and the kind of stuff that he'd been doing research on
was the same kind of stuff
that really tickled me when I was an undergraduate.
We both started doing Ethereum development.
We share a middle name.
It's weird to call someone an adversary,
but I think that's probably quite close
to what I'd call him.
(gentle music)
The things that we know about him educationally,
are very impressive.
- We found an article
that was about him when he was 13,
saying that he was about to graduate high school.
He graduated high school really early.
He finished his master's shortly after that.
He was just very advanced for his age.
(relaxed music)
- It wasn't the biggest hack.
There were bigger DeFi hacks,
but it was the DeFi hack where we actually caught the guy,
and he tried to invoke code is law.
The code is law proponents had finally found someone
who would take on the flag
and try to fight their fight,
because, up until that point it was mostly theoretical.
But now they had an actual human who was identified,
and was trying to use their idea
as a legal defence in court.
- He was issued with a warrant for his arrest.
This could be potentially the first time
that a DeFi hacker is taken into the court of law,
to test whether code is law, or whether law is law.
(relaxed music)
- Justice Myers said that,
what Andean was doing was,
asserting a difference between the law as it stands,
and his view of the world, that code is law.
- The court appointed people to go to his parents' house
and look for any computers
that he might've used in the attack,
to try to seize the assets.
- He had left the premises
and he had taken all of his devices with him,
which effectively meant that there was no option
to recover the assets.
But it also suggested to us for the first time
that Andean is on the run.
We do not know where he is.
We cannot move forward.
He is in the wind, somewhere.
The protocol pretty quickly crashed,
and,
the project was dead.
(relaxed music)
- It's an upsetting end
to a saga that's peaked when we identified him.
Believed that this was it,
this was where we fully
established that code is not law,
and once you're identified, that's it.
- People are getting more scared
of the consequences that code is law... has.
(tense music)
- The DAO hack eight years ago,
is like the real, first origin of this.
The code creates the rules and that's the law.
- DeFi projects hold billions of dollars.
People lose money in the tens of millions,
sometimes hundreds of millions.
- This was a multi-million dollar exploit.
- Days later, perhaps a week,
the next thing will be attacked, and the wheel turns.
- The size of the rewards are insane.
We did become desensitised over time.
- Today the biggest hack on DeFi yet,
$600 million in assets stolen.
- DeFi hackers see it as,
they have done nothing wrong.
Code is law.
- So, the black hat hackers are super villains
in this whole story.
(dramatic music)
- We've had yet another
turbulent week in the DeFi space,
with four projects being hacked
or exploited on the same day.
Let's dive in.
- There are two types of DeFi protocols,
ones that have been hacked,
and ones that are going to be hacked.
- You can't stay ahead of the hackers.
They're always going to be smarter than you.
They're always gonna spot vulnerabilities
faster than you can.
- It's this ever present phantom of attacks.
- We can never actually be truly safe.
- Yeah, we need to put in more and more energy,
just to stay alive.
- The hacker can just say that,
they used the system as it was created.
- The court argued that the hackers
were not guilty of receiving stolen goods,
because they interacted
with openly available smart contracts,
according to how the code was written.
- Usually no way to convince them
to give the money back.
(dramatic music)
- So, my name is Ogle.
It's a pseudonym I go by online.
I'm essentially like a white hat recovery expert,
for people who've had their money stolen.
When a protocol has been stolen from, they call me in,
to try and as a team work to get that money back.
I can say that I've meaningfully contributed
to recovering $450 million in the past year and a half.
My dad was a career criminal,
and he was in and out of prison for most of my life,
and my background was one that was surrounded by crime
and I didn't like that,
and so I feel like I'm righting a wrong in some ways.
(atmospheric music)
I love to fight, like a lot.
I like to like test strength of mind,
strength of arms, whatever it is.
(hands scraping)
Whenever you're doing any kind of
white hat hacking or recovery,
you're really battling some of the smartest people out there
and, you get to see who's better.
(bright music)
DeFi protocols,
it seems to me, are hacked virtually every day.
The way that people thought about it was,
oh, I got stolen from, move on to the next.
And I thought to myself, does it have to be that way?
Maybe there's an opportunity to bust these guys.
If you are able to identify who someone is,
there's pressure you can put on them.
For lack of a better phrase, you're manipulating people.
You're white hat hacking people.
Once that started to work,
I would just be thrown into rooms every two or three days.
Hey, can you please help us?
We have an attacker, we think we know where he is at,
but we don't know how to talk to him,
we don't know how to get the money back,
can you help us with this part?
We kept having successes.
The Curve Finance hack,
which was actually four hacks in one,
which was almost $70 million,
and a lot of other ones
between the 25, 30, $35 million range.
The largest single hack
that I've been called in to help with,
was the Euler finance hack.
They were hacked by someone who was able to steal,
almost $200 million of their assets.
You know, not like the biggest hack
that's ever occurred in crypto, but it's up there.
Top 10 or so.
We had enough information that we could write a message
that would cue it in the attacker's head,
oh wait,
they might know who I am.
He felt like he bit off way more than he could chew.
There wasn't a lot of sleeping, there was a lot of worrying.
There was a lot of running.
After a lot of communications with the attacker,
they returned all of the money to Euler finance.
This was definitely an historic return of money.
The way that I try to approach these situations,
is in the spirit of the crypto space being decentralised.
I say, hey Mr. Hacker,
give all this money back and you're gonna be clean.
You can walk away.
You can still brush your teeth in the morning,
in your privacy of your own home, no jail time.
No one likes the government coming in
and dealing with things in crypto generally.
(haunting music)
Code is law does make sense.
I mean, I get it.
The argument from the point of view
of people who don't like code is law is saying,
look, the spirit of the code was not followed,
but the argument from the other side is saying, maybe not,
but the letter of the code was,
'cause otherwise I couldn't do it.
I actually think it's a fair argument.
If you leave a hundred dollar bill
on a table and you walk away,
you also shouldn't be surprised if someone steals it.
The fact that you screwed up
by leaving it there is your problem.
- You might imagine that a white hat
is somebody who is going to find the black hat,
and then immediately ring the police.
Decentralised finance,
it has a wild west aspect to it.
You can imagine you've got a frontier town,
and the black hats and the white hats are the outlaws
that are living on the edge of the town.
They're frontier people.
They see themselves as a little bit outside of the law,
and their values are rooted in decentralisation.
So, they hate the sheriff more, than they hate each other.
(haunting music)
- The goal is not to get them arrested.
The goal is not to ruin their lives.
The goal is to get the money back.
When you're going after an attacker
and they don't believe you know who they are,
there's a lot of grandiosity,
and they're like, screw you,
whatever, you can't do anything to me.
Or whenever you tell them their name,
it's like a switch flips immediately,
and it happens every time.
Well, not every time.
(haunting music)
I was not involved in the recovery
for the Indexed Finance case,
but I watched it from afar.
It's just very atypical.
Even the strongest of people,
you have fear inside of them that you can awaken,
or you're just a psychopath,
and so you simply don't feel the fear
because you get off on the fact that people are chasing you.
You get off on the fact that people know who you are,
and they can't get you.
It becomes catch me if you can.
So, someone like Medjedovic,
this is a person who's going to fight this
if they were to be caught.
You want to come to it prepared if you're a prosecutor.
(haunting music fades)
(gentle atmospheric music)
- It's been a year and a half,
since we last heard anything about Medjedovic.
The court case is still inactive.
There are other known attackers
that have been utilising the code is law defence.
One of them is Avraham Eisenberg.
(brooding music)
- Avraham Eisenberg strikes me as the person who
to the fullest believes that code is law.
In the case of Mango Markets,
Avi was able to do what he called
a highly profitable trading strategy,
otherwise known as an exploit,
and was able to steal,
or take, or,
legally remove, in his case is what he considers it to be,
$110 million.
- Sometimes the code does exactly what was intended.
It's just what was intended isn't what anyone wanted.
Some selection of people
just don't like seeing other people make money,
is what it is.
- It just always comes back to this code is law thing,
and the vast majority of people get away with it,
and most people aren't even that mad about it in crypto.
(brooding music)
- He put on his Twitter,
"What are they gonna do, arrest me?"
I routinely deal with law enforcement.
I remember hearing from a couple of agents
who read that as a challenge.
He was surprised arrested down in Puerto Rico,
getting off of an aeroplane.
- These accusations, if he is proven guilty
in the court of law, do carry potential for prison time.
The deposition quoted Eisenberg's own Twitter account,
in explaining how the FBI tracked down his role
in this particular crime.
- Avraham Eisenberg represents the first major case,
that US law enforcement agencies see
as an opportunity to set precedent.
Their eyes are on the bigger fish.
They're looking for their Andeans,
they're looking for their Avrahams.
(atmospheric music)
(post beeps)
- So, I just found out that KyberSwap was hacked,
for,
48 million.
Someone sent, roughly $2 million
to one of the addresses that was under the control
of the Indexed hack, hacker.
(atmospheric music)
- It would appear that this is a move designed to
broadcast that he's active again,
and he's just done something else.
(atmospheric music)
Yeah, it looks like, Andean Medjedovic is back.
- He was aware when he made the transfer to that address,
that he's gonna create this strong connection
between the two hacks.
(gentle music)
He did it for the attention, for the spotlight.
If he's a good hacker, he shouldn't get any attention.
That's what a good hacker is.
He is something else.
(post beeps)
(gentle music)
It does...
remind me that I made a mistake, that bears heavily with me.
(gentle music)
I could have done better.
He kind of needs to play this out as it is right now,
being the bad guy and keep doing exploits.
That's his identity right now.
(gentle music)
And if Indexed wasn't hacked,
at all,
his life would be different.
My life would be different.
(gentle music)
- A message was sent to the Kyber team,
and it's been a couple of days since then
and there hasn't been any word.
And that's a certain type of arrogance.
- They seem to love the attention,
he just likes the chaos,
and just wants to tease them,
while the world looks on.
♪ Oh God damn, ♪
♪ That Kyber hacker's got balls ♪
♪ God damn, God damn ♪
- It's really frustrating to me, because it makes you think
that nothing is safe and this is the Wild West,
which is like the total opposite of what
everybody that is building in this field,
is trying to go for.
(gentle sombre music)
- He definitely wasn't the smartest
when he left clues the first time,
but now he's embracing that persona.
(gentle sombre music)
- Someone on Twitter posted
the KyberSwap protocol had been hacked,
and I just said, if you guys need help, let me know,
and that was it.
I found myself with the founders of KyberSwap,
and a couple of security experts,
trying to help them with what to say to the attacker.
It became really confusing.
It's like, what in the... who are we dealing with here?
- This is probably the strangest message
I've ever seen a hacker send to a protocol.
- It is the wildest,
it is six out of six on the unhinged scale.
- That's right. (laughs)
- The Kyber hacker went a step further,
and is actually demanding to take control
and ownership over the Kyber protocol
and the company itself,
which is definitely a first.
(gentle sombre music)
(post pings)
(tense music)
- The guy essentially said,
I'm gonna take over the company,
the executive team, you're all gone.
I'm gonna take care of all the workers.
He really thought this was like a plausible response.
And even if the team did say,
okay, fair enough, you can have the company,
that it wouldn't be looked at as blackmail?
(tense music)
- This makes no sense.
This is not possible to happen. Yet...
he plays this out for his audience,
who are a lot of internet trolls
who would call him a hero,
and that code is law, is what he's fighting for.
Nobody should be allowed to,
do so much harm without any repercussions.
- It makes you wonder, are you dealing with someone crazy?
They want to control everything,
and they feel like they can control everything,
and they will not ever be caught.
And maybe they won't,
maybe they won't, who knows?
But maybe they will.
(tense music)
- And I thought that,
the way that the next few years would play out for my life
was legal wrangling, going to court.
I thought that,
Medjedovic would be in court first,
and that would subsequently be precedent
for Eisenberg to be put on trial.
And it looks like that's actually flipping,
Medjedovic is probably watching the Eisenberg case,
quite closely.
(ominous music)
- The outcome of the Avi Eisenberg case
is gonna be very important I believe.
- Alleged Mango Markets exploiter Avraham Eisenberg
is working to negotiate bail
following his first New York court hearing, Thursday.
- He's willing to put a lot of resources
into defending himself to prove his case that code is law.
If he does that, this changes everything.
(tense music)
- We're beginning to see the end
of the code is law defence.
The naive belief that if you argue code is law,
that this is somehow going to save you
or rescue you from the coming onslaught
of the United States government.
Andean should be scared.
He can't really escape from the story.
(dramatic music)
- Every so often,
I'll get a message from someone that I trust.
We believe he's in x country at this point,
or he might be here, he might be there.
I would bet that if he finds something else
that has a vulnerability in it,
he is going to exploit it for his own gain.
If you've done something twice,
and you haven't been caught,
what's to stop you from doing it again?
(dramatic music)
If I ever have to look him in the eyes in a courtroom,
and then watch him be sentenced,
I don't know how I'd feel.
(dramatic music)
I felt morally obliged to chase this down.
It also opens a really weird Pandora's box.
The genesis of the idea for crypto
was an independent financial network,
but my take of it, is that,
that means moving away from banks.
It doesn't mean moving away from the ecosystems,
but as we start sentencing people,
it does feel like something's getting lost.
(dramatic music)
- I'd like for him to be caught,
for him to understand
that he can't just do these things with impunity.
(dramatic music)
I want this industry to be taken seriously.
We need to have a culture that
doesn't have so many elements where,
people are trying to say that... code is law.
- I don't want this precedent.
We wanted to create a parallel system,
and if we are going back to the justice system,
we kind of lose all of that.
Code is law, is a way to express that
we're creating our own justice system.
We have this decentralised system
because we don't agree with most of the laws
that already exist and we wanna create our own.
If we go back and we accept,
a single,
or even a group of countries that decide our fate,
we lose the initial values,
and ideas that made us start everything.
(dramatic music fades)
(ominous music)
(gentle atmospheric music)