Yesterday, I logged on to Telegram chat for the Mass Pre-sale ICO, only to discover that all of the ETH had been withdrawn from the ETH wallet due to the Parity Exploit.
My reaction ran along the lines of: "Oh no, that sucks!" Which is mild only because I took the advice of only putting in what I can afford to lose.
But from keeping up to date with the chat for the last few weeks, I know several people who believe in this project so whole-heartedly, that they went "all in", and we're talking about life-savings here. Around 1.5 million dollars were lost.
The first few minutes after it happened, everyone just seemed confused. We thought that the pre-sale had sold out, but that wasn't a bad thing. Then someone checked the wallet, and announced that everything had been withdrawn. You can imagine the result after that. Thousands of messages upset, angry, devestated and accusatory.
The devs logged on to the chat and tried their best to explain what happened and how they were powerless to stop it. It wasn't a mistake in their code or contract, but in Parity itself. They had plans in place to end the contract early once it had only a thousand ETH to go, but they didn't have enough to prematurely close it at three thousand, and could not let anyone know, or it would have made them an instant target.
So these guys had spent the week, watching hoping and praying the whole time... only to find it all gone in an instant.
Then came the project's saviours. Those wonderful white hat hackers who have been withdrawing ETHs from vulnerable accounts before the hackers can get to them.
They had bought out the pre-ico for the remaining three thousand ETH and immediately withdrawn the funds before getting in contact with the MASS team and asking them to prove that they were indeed the owners of the wallet, before giving the whole of it back.
And get this: They didn't want any donations for what they had done.
I'm speechless with their goodness! They deserve all the praise, all the good karma and bright blessings that the universe will surely give them for what they have done.