inform that have used vanity addresses or hacked vanity addresses to steal $500,000 worth of tokens from the airdrop of the Arbitrum Layer 2 scaling solution on March 23.
A Vanity Address is a personalized cryptocurrency address that contains specific words or phrases chosen by the user, with the goal of making them more personal and easily identifiable.. However, the security of these addresses is questionable.
The tweet explained that the tokens were stolen by someone who collected a pool of vanity addresses that were eligible to receive ARB tokens, and then generated similar addresses using vanity address generators, directing the airdrop tokens to these instead. Hacking these Vanity Addresses makes it impossible for the original owners to claim their ARB tokens.
Several cryptocurrency users have voiced their sadness on Twitter over the theft of their ARB tokens. Most of those affected do not know the reason for the loss and do not know what to do about it.
Creating a vanity address requires the use of special software or services that could compromise the security of users’ private keys. Hackers accessing the private key could steal any crypto assets tied to that address.
The delivery of Arbitrum tokens caused quite a stir and saturated several websites. However, according to blockchain analytics platform Nansen, there are still 428 million ARB tokens available to claim. As of late Thursday, March 22, around 240,000 addresses had yet to claim the governance tokens, despite the fact that 61% of eligible cryptocurrency wallets had already done so. The 428 million unclaimed tokens, worth nearly $596 million at press time, represent 37% of the total 1.1 billion ARB allocated for the Arbitrum airdrop.
Taking these figures into account, some eligible addresses that have not been able to claim their tokens could be in the category of hacked addresses.
This is not the first time that scammers have compromised Vanity Addresses in the crypto space.. In January, MetaMask warned cryptocurrency users about address poisoning.
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