APEcoin Update 20th Oct. 2020

3 min readOct 20, 2020

Dear APEcoin Community,

Us apes haven’t had a lot of sleep as we continue to deal with yesterday’s hack- muh! As we posted yesterday, we tried to freeze the hacker’s wallet, believing that our contract would allow us to target a specific wallet. Unfortunately, this is not the case. We can lock the enter token base, but not a specific wallet.

Double Muh… %$###!

So what next?

Well the Apes have 3 choices:

Give up, let the hacker — known now and forever as ArseHat Ape — win, and wind down the project
Try for a tokenswap early
Suck it up — contact exchanges to freeze the ETH proceeds

Based on the amazing response from the Apers in the community overnight, we’ve decided to go with option 3.

We said no to an early token swap as it would take too much time and be a fairly large distraction.
Giving up wasn’t attractive. We believe too strongly in the APEcoin vision and the Memefarm opportunity to let it go. We also don’t like the idea of ArseHat Ape winning.

We call this a “tall dwarf” scenario (no offense to dwarf apes meant). So to all you Apers out there, we’re saying gird your loins. We’re going to do our best to limit the damage, but there is going to be a bit more pain to come.

So what are we doing?

We’ve reached out to all the exchanges that we and our partners have contacts with so that we make it difficult for Arsehat Ape to sell. If we can, we will pursue legal action here — we have already made contact with the Binance compliance team to try and freeze the ETH the hacker sent there and to doxx him.

We are also addressing our token management. You will see some big movements of founder coins as we pool these to a trusted 3rd party who will act as a custody agent for us. So don’t be alarmed.

Finally, what are we going to do with ArseHat Ape? Well in classic ape fashion, we are going to ridicule them in the best way we know how. We are running a small competition for YOU out there. We want you to create the best Meme of ArseHat Ape. Submit it to us via our Discord channel.

Then, following the same method as the DAO — the Apes will vote to make a short list of the best memes, and then put out a survey on Telegram channel for you all to choose the best meme. To spice things up, we will provide the creator with a reward in APEcoins. Winners will also have their memes turned into NFTs, and they will be part of the first batch of NFTs that go into the NFT DAO. We’ll get you more details very soon!

So what happened

Based on our blockchain analysis, the affected hardware wallet associated with those addresses accessed Uniswap in the previous week. This was normal operations by the team on an address holding a small amount of $APE. We believe a third party wallet, plug-in, or service is how the access was leaked when connecting to Uniswap. We had this hot wallet connected to many applications for promotional work. We’re now setting up a cold/warm setup for future promo wallet activity. This access is to one hardware wallet. We urge all users to be very careful with how they access any crypto service, and we’ve learned to be increasingly vigilant the hard way and will release a new custody protocol for APE’s holdings.

To re-iterate, the hacked tokens were from the promotional pool and were always going to be distributed, just not in this fashion.

Next Steps

First step is to clean up this mess. That’s our focus for the next few days. As we mentioned above, we are going to pool our founder tokens and beef up key management.

We will update the Apecoin.dev website with more content and a refreshed look.

We are also working on an explanation as to how the tokenomics will work in the new DAO. Obviously numbers have changed a little now.

From there we continue to progress the MemeFarm concept. We have made progress on incorporating the DAO functionality into the smart contract and the Developers are pressing on towards completion.

Again, from all the Apes, we extend a huge thank you to all of you out there. Your support and kind words make this shitty time bearable. With a team like you behind us, we are confident we can get past this and build out our vision.

Resources

APEcoin Update 20th Oct. 2020

Written by Go-ApeCoin