Floki Inu Announces 'Existential Crisis' — Blacklists Users Who Cashed In On Bug

The team behind memecoin rising star Floki Inu FLOKI/USD announced it uncovered a bug that posed an "existential crisis" to it and blacklisted users who profited off the bug.

What Happened: In a Tuesday announcement sent through Floki Inu's official Telegram channel and subsequent messages, the coin's team explained its lead developer Jackie Xu audited all of its previous smart contracts and distribution mechanics, to date. Through his research, he found an inflation bug that resulted in people obtaining up to 1,000% more tokens than they should have during the transition.

See Also: IS FLOKI INU A GOOD INVESTMENT? 

The bug resulted in Floki Inu's supply increasing 14 times in under two weeks before being distributed to holders. Shortly thereafter, the original developer abandoned the project and a different developer tried to fix it by commissioning a new contract for the tokens to be written in under 24 hours by a third developer.

Given the time constraint, the developer could not accurately assess the inflation that took place so instead established the users who transferred their tokens to the new contract would receive 90% of their balance back if they did it nine to 12 hours before the deadline. Those who transferred six to nine hours before the deadline received 80%; one to six hours before received 70%; 10 minutes to one hour before received 60%; and lastly those who transferred 10 minutes before the deadline to the time of the deadline received just half of what they held.

Still, this transition method was exploitable because of inflation being possible, a flawed token count calculation and how fast users acted to keep as many tokens as possible, effectively making the problem worse. The faulty implementation resulted in some users receiving even more tokens than they had before instead of less — up to 1,000% more.

This time, the Floki Inu team promised to "address this inflation bug as quickly as possible without overcomplicating things and creating more problems" by blacklisting the addresses that are the biggest beneficiaries of the bug. The public list of addresses currently contains 220 addresses holding more than 7.21 billion Floki Inu tokens, partly thanks to exploiting the distribution bug.

The Floki Inu team also accused those token holders of hurting the asset's liquidity by "selling these inflated tokens in large chunks."

The purpose of the blacklist is to force the bug's beneficiaries to return or destroy the excess tokens in order to have their wallets be unlocked. The developers also admit that "many of the beneficiaries of the bug most likely had no idea they were beneficiaries" and the Floki Inu team itself "also had no idea that there was such a problem until an audit" was conducted ahead of the transition to the DAO model.