Yahya 
The price of NORMIE, a Base memecoin, sank 99% in less than three hours following a smart contract exploit. This incident temporarily slashed its market cap from nearly $42 million to $200,000. Blockchain analytics firm Lookonchain was among the first to identify the exploit and the hacker’s proposal in an on-chain message to NORMIE’s deployer address on May 26.
Negotiations with Hacker
The developers of NORMIE are now engaged with the hacker to try and reclaim around 90% of the stolen money. However, these measures have not shielded the token from a price drop to as low as 96% since the exploit. From the reports, the hacker was asking that NORMIE spend the stolen money and $2. 3 million from its development wallet to launch a new token to compensate the NORMIE holders. The hacker also wanted assurances that no action would be taken against him or her.
“We will have to re-launch, yes,” NORMIE’s team stated on a new X account created after its main one was suspended. They mentioned that the relaunch would occur after recovering their main Twitter account and the stolen funds. However, this temporary account was also suspended shortly after.
The hacker reiterated the necessity of a token re-launch before returning the funds, emphasizing, “The dev wallet made significantly more than I did during this exploit, and I have no other way to ensure that those funds are used appropriately.”
Community and Price Impact
“Dinho,” an administrator of the official NORMIE Telegram group, could not confirm when NORMIE token holders might recover their stolen funds. Dinho’s X account was also suspended. The price of NORMIE began to drop at 3:55 am UTC on May 26 and within an hour, plummeted over 92% to $0.0032. It further declined to 99.5% after two and a half hours. Although there was a brief price spike to $0.019, it continued to decrease to $0.0016 at the time of writing, marking a 96% fall. The market cap bottomed out at $200,000 but has slightly recovered since.
The team behind the blockchain scam detector tool Quick Intel claims that 72,000 NORMIE holders were impacted by the smart contract vulnerability, which had been discovered in March. The total amount of funds stolen remains unclear.
NORMIE was created recently in the memecoin craze on Base in March 2024; it had its all-time high of $130 million of market capitalization on April 2, 2024, based on data obtained from CoinGecko.