GETH: Temporary Contract Deactivation
This is Artem, COO of Guarda.
I would like to personally inform and shed some light on the accident that happened with the GETH smart contract on September 21. Additionally, we would like to personally thank everyone who has noticed and reported the issue to our team – you guys are the best.
TL;DR
There’s been a breach of our smart contract for GETH that we’re still currently investigating. Your staked ETH and its accumulated rewards remain safe and continue generating yield for you. As of right now, the contract has been deactivated and all transactions with GETH are temporarily suspended. Please do not attempt to purchase, exchange, or stake ETH/GETH right now.
What happened with the GETH contract?
There’s been a security leak of the private key of our minter address which had the ability to mint GETH tokens. As a result, on September 21, 2021, at 2:00 AM UTC the perpetrator minted 1,000,000 GETH and withdrew the entire token liquidity from Uniswap.
Most of the financial repercussions connected to the breach are on Guarda, as the token liquidity was essentially provided by us. As of right now, the contract has been deactivated and all transactions with GETH are temporarily suspended. Please do not attempt to purchase, exchange, or stake ETH/GETH right now as it may lead to loss of your funds.
NB! Ethereum staking is completely intact. The GETH contract has no impact on staked ETH nor its accumulated rewards.
It’s worth knowing that we’re still working on investigating the situation further. This statement will be updated as we go.
How will this affect you?
The compromised GETH contract has no relation to your assets staked on validators – those are completely safe. The tokenized system for staking with GETH acts as an additional security layer – all the staked ETH assets are secure and continue generating yield for you. For now, we kindly ask you to remain calm, await further updates, and once again bear in mind that your actual staked ETH remains safe and intact.
The solution
We have immediately initiated a security audit to find the source of the leak, urgently fix the breach, and eliminate the possibility of it ever happening again. The audit and investigation are currently ongoing and the update will be provided as soon as we have a clearer picture of what happened exactly.
Everyone who has been holding GETH up until the breach happened still has the same amount of GETH as before. There are few options being considered as to how exactly the contract will continue to operate. Either way, your staked assets will remain the same as before. Also, you will still be eligible to exchange GETH to ETH at a 1:1 ratio after the phase 2 launch.
Once again, thank you for bringing our attention to the issue so quickly. We are glad to have such a self-aware community who are ready to stand for what they believe in, keeping it civil, and giving us time to investigate and come up with a solution.
Update / Sep 23
What about transactions made during the GETH price drop?
Thank you for your patience and trust. As has been mentioned earlier, the GETH contract has been compromised. The following events led to the loss of the token liquidity on Uniswap v2 as well as v3. Also, there was a certain number of clients who had been able to purchase the GETH at a significantly dropped price. Due to that fact, we have decided to provide a refund to those who have been harmed in that incident along with Guarda itself. The refund decisions will be taken on a case-by-case basis.
In most cases, you are eligible for a refund if
- You have purchased GETH in the period from Sep-21-2021 AM till AM UTC time. Expected payouts are to be in ETH only.
- Added ETH/GETH Liquidity to v2 LP (https://v2.info.uniswap.org/pair/0xc474ef5f630aa50736a28bd636c7dafab30cc67b)
or v3 LP (https://info.uniswap.org/#/pools/0x675e2f47052f6b496f9f2f8d4b8bcd2a6c1c805c) Expected payouts are to be in the stake token (GETH or GETH equivalent).
Due to the fact that it is impossible to clearly determine whether the transaction was not malicious, we kindly request those eligible for compensation to sign a refund agreement as well as complete a KYC procedure and confirm their ownership of the address.
Requests for compensation are accepted at [email protected] with the following Subject: “GETH Incident – Request for compensation”. Our support team will provide you with all the additional details regarding the process.
Update / Sep 27
What is going to happen with GETH now?
Due to this incident, it is no longer possible to use the original GETH token – there have been over a million maliciously minted tokens, transferred to the perpetrator’s addresses. It is also impossible to reverse the transactions nor burn those tokens as we don’t have access to them.
So, here’s what we’re going to do: we are going to take the network snapshot right before the breach happened on Sep-21-2021 at AM UTC and deploy a new token with the new contract. If you had the original GETH on your balance, you will receive exactly the same amount of the new token and the staking process will be identical to the one it was before. No user action is needed to receive the new token.
As our investigation is still ongoing it may take up to two weeks to fully restore staking functionality. The new batch of rewards will be distributed at the same time as when staking is restored. We will let you know the updates immediately. Stay tuned for our social media updates.
We can’t thank you enough for the patience and trust shown by you while we worked to figure out the technicalities of the GETH token relaunch. You guys are the best! We hope you will continue to be your best selves in any endeavor – and we commit to doing the same.
Update / Oct 14
When will you receive the new GETH?
In the past couple of weeks, we have been doing an internal audit to make sure that all possible security measures are taken. Also, we are coding and testing the new contract for GETH which will bring more secure rewards distribution as well as the overall smart contract optimization.
We fully realize that you are frustrated with this waiting period however, we have to make sure that the new contract is impenetrable and fully secure. That is why we are asking you to give us a bit more time till the end of the next week. We are sorry for this delay yet we are certain that a thorough analysis is truly necessary.
The GETH distribution will include your full balance which you had prior to the breach on Sep-21-2021 02:00:02 AM. In addition, you will receive all of your accumulated rewards up to the day of the airdrop.
Thank you so much for your continued support and trust that you are showing us.
Update / Oct 28
GETH Distribution
As of now, all GETH tokens have been restored to the holders and all accumulated rewards have been distributed as well. The Ethereum staking is running regularly. All the issues that we have faced with the smart contract have been utilized and fixed.
The new smart contract address: 0x3802c218221390025bceabbad5d8c59f40eb74b8
Update / Jan 21
GETH is back on Uniswap
GETH token is once again available for trading on Uniswap. You can easily swap GETH for any token you like or earn via yield farming.
The new Uniswap Pool: https://v2.info.uniswap.org/pair/0x408d1f0a8a6f478f082f34c5eeb41541262ce19f
Thanks to everyone who has been waiting for this to get resolved and has shown patience and support.