Wintermute's $160M loss traced to a crackable vanity address — GPUs vs. 4.3B keys
LexSokolin · x · 2026-11-06
The quoted thread recounts how Wintermute lost $160M: their vault admin key started with 7 zeros, and the Profanity vanity-address tool seeded from only a 32-bit random number — 4.3 billion possibilities instead of 2^256. On Sept 15, 2022, 1inch published the flaw, estimating 1,000 GPUs and 50 days to crack every 7-character vanity address; $3.3M was drained the next day; by Sept 20 Wintermute's vault admin key was cracked for $160M. The poster quips that GPU farms will crack open every treasure chest in the world.
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