Crypto Wallet Provider Phantom Says Its Systems Were Not Compromised in $4M Hack

After a nearly week-long investigation, its team found no vulnerabilities that could explain the exploit.

By Jamie Crawley

Aug 10, 2022 at 12:22 p.m. UTC

Updated Aug 11, 2022 at 2:43 p.m. UTC

Hands of young African woman opening empty black wallet — (fizkes/Getty Images/iStockphoto)

Jamie Crawley

Jamie Crawley is a CoinDesk news reporter based in London.

Follow @JamieCrawleyCD on Twitter

Solana-based wallet provider Phantom said its systems were not compromised in the exploit where hackers drained around $4 million from over 9,000 wallets.

Phantom tweeted on Tuesday that after a nearly week-long investigation, its team found no vulnerabilities that could explain the exploit. The wallet provider added that it has been independently audited by Halborn Security and OtterSec. The auditing firms have, so far, not found any issues that could explain the incident.

"While some Phantom users were affected, in each case we have reviewed, we found that they had imported their seed phrases/private keys to or from a non-Phantom wallet," Phantom added.

The attack, which started on Aug. 3, affected numerous hot wallet (wallets which stay connected to the internet at all times) providers, such as Slope and TrustWallet, as well as Phantom.

At the time, the Solana network's engineers said that Slope wallets had been compromised, which Slope confirmed but did not say whether the private key storage practices were involved. Phantom added that it had reason to believe "complications related to importing accounts to and from Slope" was the starting point of the attack.

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