The Normie memecoin (NORMIE) has seen its value decline by over 99% after a massive exploit on its platform on May 26.
Within hours of the hack, Normie’s market capitalization decreased from nearly $42 million to just $100,000. The token’s price plunged from $0.32 to $0.0032. It has further decreased to $0.0016 as of press time.
The incident, caused by a smart contract vulnerability, has led to frantic negotiations between the Normie team and the hacker responsible. The exploit targeted a weakness in Normie’s tax function, allowing the hacker to manipulate the token’s total supply and drain its liquidity pools. Blockchain analytics firm Lookonchain was among the first to detect the exploit and the hacker’s offer.
According to the analytics firm, the hacker, in an on-chain message, proposed to return 90% of the stolen funds on the condition that the Normie developers re-launch the project. The hacker would retain 10% of the funds as a bug bounty.
Notably, the hacker criticized the quality of Normie’s contract code, describing it as a “copy-paste” job. They even suggested similar vulnerabilities might exist in other tokens with overly complicated tax logic.
Normie developers accepted the hacker’s proposal, as confirmed in its now-suspended account on X. The team has also communicated via a newly created account, stating,
“We will have to re-launch, yes. That will come after we get our main Twitter account back and after we get the funds from the exploiter.”
The hacker also laid down strict conditions for the return of the funds, insisting that the re-launch must precede the handover to ensure the funds are used appropriately.
“The dev wallet made significantly more than I did during this exploit, and I have no other way to ensure that those funds are used appropriately,”
the hacker stated in a message.
NORMIE was previously among the top meme coins on Ethereum Layer 2 Network, Base, with a market cap exceeding $40 million and nearly 90,000 on-chain token holders. It was launched in March 2024 amid the memecoin frenzy and reached a peak market cap of $130 million by April 2. The recent exploit, however, has cast a long shadow over its future.
Meanwhile, in a recent update on their new Twitter account, the Normie team announced that a new version of the platform is now active. Users were advised to “immediately migrate” to this new platform within 24 hours.
???? $NORMIE V2 Migration is Now Live
All $NORMIE holders are advised to immediately migrate to the new contract.
Users have 24 hours to migrate before the legacy contract is burned and users refunds are issued.
Migrate Now ➡️ https://t.co/wALZC6jSMp pic.twitter.com/5WZP7z9pyr
— Normie (@crown_premium_P) May 27, 2024
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