A white-hat hacker helped recover $2 million worth of ETH that had been locked in an ICO contract since 2016 for nine years.

CoinFeed reported on June 1st that, according to The Block, a developer using the pseudonym Florent helped free approximately 1003 ETH (worth about $2 million) that had been trapped in the HongCoin ICO contract for nine years since 2016. The ICO should have automatically refunded funds due to failing to meet its funding goals, but a coding error caused the funds to be locked. Because the contract used an older version of the Solidity language, it lacked overflow protection mechanisms. Florent discovered that by calling the team's administrator function and inputting a specific value, the holder's balance could be reset to 1, thus releasing the ETH through a refund check. This administrator function was restricted to HongCoin's multi-signature address. After Florent contacted the team and verified the process on the testnet, the team signed the unlock transaction themselves.