White Hat Hacker Recovers $2M in ETH Trapped in 2016 Hong Coin Smart Contract

ChainCatcher report: On Sunday, a white-hat hacker operating under the alias "0xflorent" stated on X that they helped recover approximately 1,003 ETH (valued at around $2 million) from a faulty smart contract related to the 2016 Hong Coin (HONG) token sale, benefiting 48 investors. Hong Coin was originally designed as a community-operated decentralized venture fund. Its token sale began on August 29, 2016, and ended on October 28, 2016, but failed to launch due to not meeting its funding goal. The contract was intended to automatically refund investors, but a vulnerability in the refund function locked the funds for nearly a decade. 0xflorent collaborated with the HONG creators to exploit an integer overflow vulnerability in an administrative function. By inputting specific values, they reset token holders' balances and triggered the refund mechanism, successfully extracting the locked funds. According to Etherscan data, one investor has already received a refund of 96 ETH (approximately $192,500). Previously, on May 24, 0xflorent recovered 19.33 ETH from another failed token sale project dating back to 2018.