πŸ“£ Official Bittensor Update (2024-07-18T21:20:30.974000+00:00)

Hello @everyone,

You probably noticed that we canceled today’s novelty search call. Now that the chain is back to normal operations, the Opentensor Foundation (OTF) is focusing on organizing the community to come together and support those affected by the attack.

We will resume the regular schedule of the novelty search calls next week with the first one dedicated to three distinct efforts below currently taking place by the community at large:

### Clawback efforts
Various community members, including OTF, are working with several exchanges to claw back funds moved by the attacker. As of today we are aware of ~10k TAO that potentially can be salvaged from the bridge. In addition, several other exchanges are looking into tracking down additional funds targeted by the attacker . Bare in mind that clawing back funds is a long process dictated mostly by the exchanges themselves. Our best course of action, as a community, is to put pressure on the exchanges to prioritize these clawback efforts.

### Law enforcement efforts
Multiple community members affected by the attack as well as OTF, have engaged law enforcement agencies including two teams at the FBI and the Secret Service. In addition, OTF is funding two separate investigations by 1) ZachXBT, the famous on-chain analyst as well as 2) Inca Digital, a well regarded intelligence firm in the digital asset domain. The purpose of these investigations is to track down the attackers as well as help with the clawback efforts.

### Restitution efforts
Simultaneously, we are in the process of designing an on-chain mechanism to allow community members to anonymously contribute to those affected by the attack. Enabling such mechanisms on-chain will allow the community to restore those affected by the attack in a decentralized manner native to the Bittensor way. As of now we have already received early verbal indications from various community members willing to participate in this effort in a meaningful way.

As you can imagine, each of these efforts independently is non-trivial. Rest assured we are taking this situation extremely seriously and many in the community are dedicating ample amounts of time and attention to this. In the meantime, we ask for your participation as well as your patience.
As we said in our initial community update after the attack β€œMoments like this often become watershed moments for major projects such as Bittensor.” It is heartwarming and reassuring to see how all of us, as a community, rise to the challenge and turn this attack into a moment of triumph and growth.

Onward