A DeSci Project, NobleBlocks, showed resilience as it absorbed collateral damage from the Hedgey Finance Hack attack. Crypto hacks are news flash events that can have ripple effects and cost millions—in this case, about $44.7 million.
The hack resulted in millions of customer funds being lost, but NobleBlocks and Hedgey Finance quickly collaborated to help recover user funds. But how did all of this happen, and can NobleBlocks’ response be something to emulate in the future?
NobleBlocks’ response and recovery efforts were open and fast, just like the values they intend to instill in their DeSci scientific publication platform project.
How Did the Hedgey Finance Hack Happen?
Hedgey Finance is a crypto project that helps other teams create and manage claim portals, on-chain token vesting, and lockups. On 19th April, they announced falling under the hands of malicious elements, resulting in them being exploited across a series of transactions worth $44.7 million.
Basically, the attackers used flash loans to exploit the project’s smart contract on Arbitrum and Ethereum blockchains. There was a loss of around $42.6 million on Arbitrum, while only around $2.1 million was recorded on the Ethereum blockchain.
According to experts, the major contributor to this attack was the lack of proper implementation of the input validation for one of the project’s token-locking contracts. Thus, the attacker exploited this vulnerability, making the smart contract approve a series of token transfers.
The vulnerable function in the smart contract is the ‘createLockedCampaign’ function, which should help create vesting or locked claims campaigns. So, this function had validation for almost all of its parameters besides the claimLockup parameter.
This made assets locked in campaigns available for withdrawal, allowing the attackers to withdraw different tokens, including USDC, NOBL, MASA, and BONUS.
How Was NobleBlocks Affected by the Hack?
Decentralized Science (DeSci) project NobleBlocks was one of the protocols affected by the atrocious hack. Immediately, they took to their X account to announce to their community and provide important safety measures to their users.
Hedgey Finance was a token infrastructure platform where many NOBL tokens were vested, and the hacker stole some of them. According to another announcement from Hedgey Finance on X, they specified that around $1.9 million NOBL tokens were stolen from the attack.
Hedgey Finance also clarified that only their platform was affected by the attack and not that of NobleBlocks. Thus, all activities on NobleBlocks could continue, including PinkSale token participants.
Response and Recovery Efforts
Image from Etherscan (Hedgey Finance’s messages to the hacker on Etherscan)
NobleBlocks and Hedgey Finance collaborated and are working to ensure that the funds stolen by the hackers are recovered. According to media sources, Hedgey Finance is working closely with Consensys Diligence and SEAL_Org to manage what has happened.
Furthermore, they said they sent a message to the hacker on Etherscan as they began fund recovery.
NobleBlocks shared updates from their close communication with Hedgey and an MEV bot operator, Coffeebabe, with their community. Their press release stated that efforts to recover NOBL and ETH are ongoing and that the affected balances will soon be restored.
Regarding their current token status, NobleBlocks mentioned that they believe it is now safe for their users to trade NOBL tokens again. Furthermore, any other token within token vesting infrastructure like Hedgey Finance is now securely locked, while those stolen by the hacker have been liquidated.
The Challenges Facing Scientific Publishing – Is DeSci the Answer?
Moving ahead of the hack, many challenges face the publishing of scientific articles, including timely review processes, high publication fees, and transparency. Scientific progress has enough barriers to overcome, and publishing findings should represent achievement and accomplishment.
But those sensations are often dampened by long waiting times for approvals and hefty Article Processing Charges (APCs) charges. Individual researchers and teams not only invest their energy but often provide peer-reviewing services for free as a part of the scientific community.
Still, when they themselves publish, the very same community-driven research teams are met with as much as $500 to cover the costs of publishing in a lower-tier journal, a whopping $2,500 for mid-tier journals, and about $6,000 for top-tier journals.
Nevertheless, while a number of hybrid cost-sharing journals have emerged, hurdles remain. Enter blockchain technology.
By utilizing the benefits of blockchain technology alongside proper incentives and reward mechanisms, the scientific sector can scale more fairly in a system where the pricing structure is highly monopolized.
Understanding What NobleBlocks Is and How it Works
Image from NobleBlocks
NobleBlocks is pushing for change and empowering scientists and knowledge creators alike to join the DeSci (Decentralized Science) revolution. More specifically, NobleBlocks will focus on removing hurdles such as high APCs while setting up mechanisms to help create more fair, qualified, and timely reviews.
NobleBlocks creates a public infrastructure built on the blockchain for developing, reviewing, managing, and distributing scientific articles. By introducing DeSci, this crypto project aims to increase community engagement and satisfaction, as well as much-needed incentivization and transparency to manage the growth in scientific research and publication
NobleBlocks does this by employing the following:
Innovative Scientific Publishing
NobleBlocks introduces a couple of innovative and revolutionary processes to ensure they address the inefficiencies of traditional scientific publishing. First, they introduced decentralization, allowing authors of different backgrounds to get their works published.
Secondly, the introduction of blockchain technology brought about immutability, subsequently leading to a permanent record of publications. Other important innovations include reduced costs for researchers and an efficient peer-to-peer review process.
Community Empowerment
NobleBlocks allows interaction and communication among its community members. In fact, through its NOBL token, it recognizes and rewards the efforts of editors and reviewers on its platform.
Final Thoughts on NobleBlocks’ Response
Although NobleBlocks suffered collateral damage from the attack on the Hedgey Finance token vesting platform, they were the innocent bystander, with more than $1.9 million worth of NOBL tokens stolen.
However, NobleBlocks remains undiscouraged and instead swung into action, collaborating with important entities like Hedgey Finance and Coffeebabe to ensure the damages suffered from the hack are addressed.
There will always be hurdles when embarking on and building projects with a high risk-to-reward ratio, and while this one incident may be a hurdle beyond NobleBlocks’ control, the team maintains its resilience and commitment to democratizing the scientific publishing landscape.
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