Premint to Return $500K in Ethereum to NFT Hack Victims

The NFT platform is also acquiring wallet security firm Vulcan to help prevent hacks from happening again, said Premint CEO Brenden Mulligan.

NFT registration platform Premint, which over the weekend suffered a hack that saw over 300 NFTs stolen from users’ wallets, announced today that it intends to repay the hack’s victims.

In a live-streamed incident update this afternoon, Premint CEO Brenden Mulligan announced that the company, in collaboration with “a third-party, non-Premint employee” performed on-chain analysis this week to compile a list of all NFTs stolen during Sunday’s hack.

Over the course of this week, every associated crypto wallet on that list will receive a payment in Ethereum (ETH) equivalent to the collection floor price of every stolen NFT as of 10:00 a.m. PST this morning. Mulligan told Decrypt the total sum that Premint will repay to defrauded customers will amount to around 340 ETH, or just over $525,000.

“I realize that the NFTs stolen were not all floor NFTs,” Mulligan said this morning. “Floor” refers to the cheapest available NFT of a given collection. Some of the NFTs stolen were considered rare and valued at a much higher market price than those priced at the floor. “You might feel like this compensation isn’t enough. But I don’t think there’s any other scalable and objective way to do this,” said the Premint CEO.

There are two prominent exceptions to that repayment policy: the two most expensive NFTs stolen on Sunday, a Bored Ape the hackers flipped for 89 ETH ($138,000), and an Azuki they sold for just over 10 ETH ($16,000). Mulligan announced today that Premint was able to buy both NFTs off their new owners at purchase price, and has since returned them to their pre-hack owners. Mulligan stated these were the most valuable NFTs taken by the hackers “by orders of magnitude.”

During the announcement, Mulligan stated his general aversion to repaying the victims of digital asset hacks. “I have this feeling, and many others have this feeling, that compensation in this world, when a hack happens, actually has a negative long-term effect,” Mulligan said. “Because it doesn’t teach people a lesson.”