Opal Recovers $1.7 Million Coins, Cancels Blockchain Rollback

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Opal team took back its resolution to rollback the blockchain after recovering 65% of the stolen coins from the hacker.

On December 15th 2014, the Opal crew discovered a malicious wallet attack that ultimately cost them around 2.5 million coins . In order to reduce the impact of the hack, the team reached the Opal community with a proposal to rollback the blockchain. A majority of Opal users favored the suggestion and the team consequently made their democratic decision public.

Soon after, the hacker contacted the Opal team to negotiate. He subsequently agreed to return a stash of 1.7 million coins to their rightful owners. Upon receiving the funds, the Opal team took to its blog to announce the rollback’s cancellation. The rest of the stolen coins meanwhile will be sold back at a reasonable price, assured the hacker.

“Before negotiations took place, the hacker would have held too large a portion of Opal which could have threatened the decentralization of the blockchain,” the Opal team said in its explanation. “Thanks to 65% of the coins being returned, the Opal Team believes this danger has been averted and a rollback would have set a bad precedent, and thus is not justifiable.”

What the ‘Hack’ Was That?
The hacker, known by the alias of ‘Diabonhxeo’, distributed a download link of Opal’s new client on Bitcoin Talk forums. In reality, the installer was a virus that installed key loggers on the victims’ computers, and further located the wallet.dat files that possessed the information of users’ wallets and private keys.

From what we gathered, it seemed like an honest mistake from users’ end that led to the theft of a huge chunk of cryptocurrency. Opal team asked its followers to download software only from their official page, www.opal-coin.com. The links for the wallet will generate from wallets.opal-coin.com.