EigenLayer investigates the case of an investor "stealing" 1.6 million EIGEN

A "rare" attack has the EigenLayer community questioning the token vesting of investors and VC funds.
Late on October 4, the EigenLayer community was stirred up when Lookonchain discovered that a whale wallet had dumped 1,673,645 EIGEN via MetaMask at a price of around $3.3, while this amount of tokens was received from the EigenLayer team's own wallet.

That is, this whale is one of the early investors, or "family wallet", the project team's wallet that received such a huge amount of tokens.

However, according to EigenLayer's tokenomics, the project has only just opened the EIGEN airdrop transfer. The investor's and VC fund's tokens are both locked and will be unlocked in September 2025.

This incident not only makes the community doubt the security of EigenLayer but also question why the token that was originally locked can be sold without any obstacles? Because while the token must be locked by a smart contract vesting, which is inherently designed by any project to manage distribution, vesting according to tokenomics?

After receiving 1.67 million EIGEN, the whale wallet used the swap feature on MetaMask to sell 5.5 million USD stablecoins. Then transferred these stablecoins to CEX exchanges, most likely to "cash out" into fiat money.

Therefore, the community suspects two possibilities: one is that EigenLayer's investors violated the token lock contract and "stolen" EIGEN; the other is that this wallet was hacked.

Shortly after, the project officially announced on X that this was an attack by hijacking the victim's email:

"This morning, an email related to the transfer of tokens to investors was hijacked by a malicious attacker.

As a result, 1,673,645 EIGEN tokens were mistakenly transferred to the attacker's address. They then swapped tokens on a decentralized platform, then transferred stablecoins to the CEX exchange. We are in contact with the relevant platforms, as well as reporting the incident to law enforcement. A portion of the funds have now been frozen.

This attack does not affect the EigenLayer ecosystem. This is not a bug from any vulnerability in the protocol or smart contract, and the attack does not affect any on-chain features."

As can be seen, the hacker took over the email of one of the project's investors, causing the team to transfer tokens to the hacker's wallet instead of the owner's wallet.

However, a very big question that EigenLayer has not answered is why the token that was originally locked can be sold easily? Does the project not have a smart contract vesting?

Meanwhile, EigenLayer still affirms that the smart contract has no vulnerabilities.
The price of EIGEN since its listing on October 1 has been maintained around $3.5.