• A few hours ago, VeChain announced that a total of 1 billion VET tokens had been stolen.
• When creating the private key for a wallet, an employee made a mistake and the private key could be stolen.

The VeChain Foundation has announced in a blog post that a private key to a wallet of the buyback program could be stolen due to human error. However, VeChain reacted quickly and immediately initiated investigations into the incident. Nevertheless, more than a billion VET tokens could be stolen from the wallet.

Human error causes mega hack

Last night, according to the VeChain Foundation, approximately 1.1 billion VET tokens were sent to this address, probably the hacker’s destination address. The VeChain Foundation has immediately marked the address on VeChainStats, so that it will be informed as soon as the hacker sends the VET from the address. The post continues:

VeChain Foundation has been tracing the transfer of these VET Tokens in real-time and has taken several steps as outlined below to contain the situation. The security integrity of the mainnet and our official mobile wallet had not been affected in any way or form.

VeChain has continued to notify all exchanges to stop and immediately freeze all tokens coming from the hacker address. VeChain is continuously investigating the case and will monitor every flow of data and money. The team has pinpointed the cause of the incident and comes to this conclusion:

Security breach was most likely due to misconduct of one of the team members within our finance team, who have created the buyback account without thoroughly obeying The Standard Procedure approved by the Foundation, and our auditing team did not pick up this misconduct, due to human error. We would like to emphasize that the incident is in no way related to the effectiveness of the actual Standard Procedure or VeChain’s hardware wallet solutions. And the responsible person without following full compliance will hold the accountability and consequences of internal management actions.

The VeChain Foundation is currently doing everything it can to find the hacker. It has also reported the law enforcement incident in Singapore. Further updates will follow.

Change in governance model finally confirmed by steering committee

The VeChain steering committee decided a few hours ago to change the governance model and introduce the decentralised VeVote voting platform. On 13 December, the VeChain Foundation announced that the very first vote on the VeVote platform had been successfully completed.

The new governance model changes the distribution of votes by returning the majority of votes and authority to the community. This will give Economic Node and X Node operators the right to vote up to 60% of the votes. The remaining 40% of the votes will go to Masternode holders. These consist of developers, authorities and companies that own at least 25 million VETs.

This gives the community new power and allows it to participate directly in future development decisions and thus influence the further progress of the project through greater decentralization. This step could set a precedent that could serve as a role model in the blockchain industry.

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