On May 26, Base Memecoin Normie suffered an exploit, causing a $41.7M drop in its market cap within 3hrs.
According to the company behind Base Memecoin Normie, they are in negotiations with their hacker to refund 90 percent of the stolen cash due to a smart contract weakness. In less than 3hrs, the token’s market cap dropped by $41.7 million.
On May 26, the blockchain analytics company Lookonchain was one of the first to discover the exploit and the hacker’s offer. Normie’s deployer address received an on-chain message containing this discovery. Despite the fact that the price had already dropped by 96% since the exploit, they allegedly accepted the hacker’s offer to recover 90% of the stolen NORMIE tokens.
However, Normie agreed to a condition that the hacker would use the stolen assets and the $2.3 million that was in the team’s development wallet to launch a new token in order to reimburse Normie. Additionally, the hacker requested that there be no retaliation in a separate on-chain post.
“We will have to re-launch, yes,” the team behind Normie said on a new X account that they reportedly formed after the suspension of their primary account. At the time, they said, “That will come after we get our main Twitter account back and after we get the funds from the exploiter.”
However, they promptly suspended the temporary account. However, the hacker reiterated their strict conditions, insisting that a token re-launch is necessary before the user can receive a refund. One of the administrators of the official NORMIE Telegram group, who goes by the name “Dinho,” was unable to provide a timeframe for when the token holders will be able to retrieve their stolen assets. We also suspended Dinho’s X account.
According to CoinGecko, the price of NORMIE began to decline around 3:55 am UTC on May 26, and within a single hour, it has already dropped by more than 92% to a value of $0.0032. Two and a half hours later, it had dropped to 99.5%.
Aside from a brief price increase to $0.019, the price has continued to travel on a downward trajectory, reaching $0.0016 at the time of this writing, which is a 96% decrease from its previous trading level.T he company’s market capitalization reached a low point of $200,000 after falling from $41.9 million, but it has begun to recover slightly since then.
The team that developed the blockchain scam detector tool Quick Intel claims that the smart contract vulnerability, discovered in March, affected 72,000 NORMIE holders. Amidst the recent memecoin mania on Base, they made its market debut in March 2024. According to CoinGecko, the cryptocurrency reached its highest market cap of $130 million on April 2 of that same year.