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Kevin Rose loses ‘high-value’ NFTs in hack

Kevin Rose

The personal wallet of Kevin Rose, co-founder and CEO of Moonbirds creator Proof, was hacked and valuable assets stolen Wednesday after he was targeted in a phishing scam.

Rose lost 40 NFTs, including an Autoglyph worth close to $500,000, and 25 Chromie Squiggles from NFT project Art Blocks, according to reports.

“Please avoid buying any Squiggles until we get them flagged (just lost 25) + a few other NFTs (an Autoglyph),” Rose wrote in a Tweet to his 1.6 million followers revealing the hack. 

Proof’s VP of Engineering Arran Schlosberg said Rose was “phished into signing a malicious signature that allowed the hacker to transfer a large number of high-value tokens.”

“This was a classic piece of social engineering, tricking [Rose] into a false sense of security,” Schlosberg tweeted. 

“The technical aspect of the hack was limited to crafting signatures accepted by OpenSea’s marketplace contract.”

Moonbirds is a collection of 10,000 pixelated owl picture-profile (PFP) NFTs released by Proof, a members-only collective of NFT collectors and artists, in April 2022. A few days after its launch, Moonbirds had reportedly generated more than $280 million in secondary sales. 

Autoglyphs is an on-chain generative art project by Larva Labs, the NFT project behind CryptoPunks.

Note that the portrait image heading this article is AI-generated, based on Kevin Rose’s likeness (Polemos/MidJourney)

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Polemos staff

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