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Normie Token Price Drops 99% as Attacker Calls Meme Coin Fiscal Contract a ‘Copy-Paste’ Job
The hyped Base meme coin normarie (NORMIE) plummeted 99% on Sunday after being hit by an exploit that saw attackers manipulate the token’s total supply, completely draining its liquidity reserves.
Blockchain investigators said the attackers exploited a so-called tax feature in the token contract to issue more tokens than the expected supply of 1 billion. The extra tokens were then exchanged for ether.
In an on-chain message late Sunday, the attacker offered Normie developers a way to receive 90% of their stolen funds back if they agreed to revive the project.
“I offer to return 90% of the exploited ETH, withholding 10% as a bug bounty (without retaliation,” reads the on-chain message. “One condition: it, and the 600 ETH in the dev wallet, are used to launch fairly a new token used to refund NORMIE holders.”
Six hundred ether is worth almost $2.3 million at current prices. The move marked one of the first cases in which a hacker kept relaunching the project as a condition for returning funds. Normie developers accepted the reward offer early Monday, messages on the project’s official Telegram group viewed by CoinDesk showed.
In an other message on the chain In the Asian morning hours on Monday, the attacker called Normie’s contract code a “copy-paste” job that was likely not thoroughly reviewed by its developers before going live.
“This exact code is present in numerous other token contracts, some of which significantly pre-date Normie. Most meme tokens are simply copy-and-paste operations of the same small set of contracts, all with overly complicated tax logic in the function transfer,” the attacker said.
“I suspect this is simply a case of them reusing code that they haven’t thoroughly examined,” they added. Before the dump, NORMIE was among the top meme coins on Base with a market capitalization of more than $40 million and nearly 90,000 on-chain token holders, according to DEXTools metrics. Normie is slang for a “normal person” and the Base version was modeled after a blue frog that resembled the popular Pepe the Frog character.
Its market cap is just $700 as of early Monday following the exploit.
Meanwhile, at least one NORMIE investor suffered a huge loss as a result of the attack, with his $1.6 million investment turning into just $150 in a matter of seconds.
“Since $NORMIE was exploited, the $11.23 million $NORMIE purchased by this trader spent $1.16 million is now worth less than $150,” analytics firm Lookonchain posted on X. “He spent $1.16 million to buy $11.23 million NORMIE at $0.1035 from March 25 to April 9 and held it until now without selling it.
Normie’s X has been suspended since early Asia on Monday.