This week, someone won more than $3 million in the popular online Ethereum game Fomo3D, which LongHash wrote about here. We discovered, however, that the winner is not done.







First, a brief introduction to Fomo3D.





The rules are as follows:





1. The game starts to count down automatically for 24 hours. When the clock goes down to zero, the game is over, until the clock starts again.





2. Players can purchase keys with Ether (ETH). Every time you buy a key, the countdown increases by 30 seconds, and the upper limit does not exceed 24 hours.





3. Of the ETH spent on the purchase of keys, 50% goes into the prize pool, and another 48% is assigned to the player holding the key. The other 2% goes to the community.





4. As the number of buyers increase, so does the price of keys. Every time you buy a key, you have the chance to get an ETH airdrop.





5. When the game countdown reaches zero, the game is over, and the last person to have bought a key gets all the ETH in the pool.





When the game started, some feared that the game could go on forever, because it cleverly uses human psychology to extend the life cycle of the game. But the game came to a halt on August 22, when a hacker forced the game to end. That hacker made off with 10,470 Eth, or around US$3 million.





How was the first round of Fomo3D terminated?





Some call the winner “Brother Five" because the winning address 0xa169DF5ED3363cfC4c92ac96C6C5f2A42fCCBF85 ends with the number "5". I personally like this name, even though we don’t know if “Brother Five” is a man or a woman, so I will use it for this article.





I have looked at the account details for 0xa169DF5ED3363cfC4c92ac96C6C5f2A42fCCBF85 and found that there are three types of outbound transfers for this account.

In short, Brother Five’s account only did two things: 1) transfer money to Fomo3D's game address and 2) continuously initiate transactions to the contract address created by himself.



The latter was the key to winning the game. You can see six abnormal records drawn by the red line. Their handling fee is about 0.04 ETH, which is 100 to 1000 times more than normal. The Ethereum network will give priority to those bids.

Brother Five’s process of winning the Fomo3D jackpot is as follows. Brother Five bought the key in the last three minutes like other players, and then Brother Five initiated a transaction to the contract address that he/she created through his/her other Ethereum account. The high transaction fee led all the mining pools to focus on Brother Five’s transactions. This meant that all their computing resources were occupied by Brother Five’s contract, which blocked the Ethereum network for three minutes. During that period, all the other players could not play the game normally, and Brother Five succeeded in becoming the last player to buy a key, winning a prize of around USD $3 million.





The first round of Fomo3D is over. What does Brother Five do next?







We found that Brother Five is still playing other games that resemble Fomo3D. In fact, we found that within two hours of winning Fomo3D, Brother Five was already participating in two other games.

On August 23 at 4:30 pm, Brother Five’s account, 0xa169DF5ED3363cfC4c92ac96C6C5f2A42fCCBF85 continued to buy keys in other games that resemble Fomo3D.





By analyzing Brother Five’s account, we found that he/she bought keys in four games, including Fomo3D and three others like it.

As Fomo3D’s code is open source, it is very easy to create similar versions. This is very useful for someone like Brother Five. Because he/she already figured out how to win the original Fomo3D, he/she could figure out how to win similar versions as well. In fact, there are reports that he/she has already won one of these games, but LongHash has not yet independently confirmed. What we do know is that Brother Five is playing games with a combined winning pot amount of 16,000 ETH. We don’t yet know how long Brother Five will be able to continue this winning streak, but it’s definitely worth watching.



