Regarding Parity Multisig Wallet V1.5 and above exploit

As many in the Ethereum community and greater crypto community already know, black hat hackers exploited a weakness in the Parity multisig wallet (v1.5 and above) codebase. That exploit resulted in the theft of 153,037 ETH total from three projects; Swarm City, Edgeless, and Æternity. While the Swarm City core team is laser focused on assessing the full scope of the damage, as well as forging a path forward, we believe it is appropriate to discuss the situation as we know it one day later. For reference, here are the announcements from each individual project:

What happened

To recap, at approximately 12:00 PM ET on July 18th, 2017, Bernd Lapp of Swarm City noticed all funds in the Swarm City Parity multisig wallet had been moved to this address:

https://etherscan.io/address/0xb3764761e297d6f121e79c32a65829cd1ddb4d32#internaltx

Bernd quickly alerted the Swarm City core team, the Ethereum Foundation, and multiple developer groups. Together they were able to determine that malicious actors had found and exploited a flaw in the Parity multisig code itself, which allowed them to steal funds not only from Swarm City, but also Edgeless, and Æternity. The total losses are as follows:

Swarm City — 44,055 ETH

Edgeless — 26,793 ETH

Æternity — 82,189 ETH

Swift action was taken by White Hat hackers who used the same exploit to secure ETH stored in Parity multisig wallets (v1.5 and above) across the community. In all, they were able to move funds totaling approximately $170 Million from affected wallets into safe wallets, saving the development funds of many Ethereum projects. While our funds have been irreversibly stolen, we owe them a great debt of gratitude for their actions, as does the greater Ethereum community.

White Hat wallet address and statement on Etherscan:

https://etherscan.io/address/0x1dba1131000664b884a1ba238464159892252d3a

Please note: No tokens (unless stored in the above mentioned Parity multisig wallet) are affected. SWT stored in a Swarm City wallet or MyEtherWallet are not affected.

How we are proceeding

The Swarm City core team wishes to reaffirm our commitment to our community and the Ethereum community as a whole. We strongly believe Ethereum development is a liberalizing force for good, and that we are helping the world evolve in a peaceful way.

Changing the world means living where the limits of technology, philosophy, and human action meet. This is where we choose to live, with full recognition that it is sometimes messy. This is a messy time, however, when things go wrong one has two choices of how to respond; to deflate and withdraw, or to amplify and persevere. We choose the latter; to galvanize our team and community and face this challenge head on.

We also commit to the following:

We will continue to create value for our community and token holders by delivering the Swarm City Platform in full.

We will work towards finding new ways to fundraise (such as Trelleth) so that future Ethereum projects won’t have large sums sitting in a limited number of accounts.

We will pursue a more formal action plan for alerting the community and positive actors in future times of crisis, giving everyone the best opportunity to respond.

How you can help

Please be careful to secure your own funds. If you currently hold funds in a Parity multisig wallet (v1.5 or greater) please move them to a secure wallet.

Participate in our project! You may reach us at support@swarm.city for any questions, or to request an invite into our Slack. Also, Dev contributions are always welcome. Here is a link to our Github: https://github.com/swarmcity

Our community and the broader Ethereum community consists of people who believe they can change the world through technology. Swarm City has the most vibrant community in the Ethereum ecosystem, and strengthened by them, we are confidently continuing our work. Together we will not only survive this painful event, but rise stronger and more aligned than ever before. We are motivated by building technological solutions that enable a truly decentralized sharing economy, and we cannot be deterred.

Join us in shaping the future of decentralized apps and their ecosystems.

Thank you for supporting us. More to come.