So Kellar tried a different tactic, messaging Medjedovic and addressing him as “Andean.” “I can't think of any other student in my time here who has gotten that degree that early,” says David Jao, a professor of mathematics at Waterloo.ĭespite multiple attempts by the crypto platform, the prodigy has repeatedly joked about their ‘rewards’ and refused to return the (Andean Medjedovic on the right)Īlso Read: Co-Creator Of Elon Musk's Favorite Dogecoin Calls 95% of All Crypto Projects 'Scam and Garbage' The Company’s Attempts To Recover FundsĮven though Laurence Day had already contacted the math prodigy to offer a 10% reward for the tokens' safe return, striking a note of grudging praise-“well played,” he wrote-but hadn't heard back. Medjedovic had presented his master's thesis on random matrix theory and was last year planning to apply to Ph.D. He had cruised through his bachelor's in three years at Waterloo, one of Canada's top schools for math and computer science and the alma mater of Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin.

His résumé said he had an interest in cryptocurrency. 18-year-old Medjedovic had until recently been a master's student at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, specializing in mathematics. When Indexed went live in 2020, Medjedovic, who goes by Andy, had just started working on his master's degree.

On checking the chat, Laurence found out that the coder had deleted his messages and changed his username!Īfter taking numerous steps like pulling up the participant's registration, getting his profile on the coding platform GitHub which was created by someone whose email address began with “amedjedo”, to finding that there was a Wikipedia contributor with a username similar to the one on GitHub, the quest finally lead to finding that it was 18-year-old Andean Medjedovic, a notable mathematician who did it all. Weeks earlier, a coder going by the username “UmbralUpsilon”had reached out to Day and Kellar on Discord, offering to create a bot that would make their platform more efficient. How The Hacker Was IdentifiedĪfter realizing that he hadn't heard back from one particular collaborator, Indexed Finance’s contributor Laurence Day searched his chat. Altogether, the hacker had run off with $16 million worth of assets, as per a Bloomberg report. It appeared that the platform had been fooled into severely undervaluing tokens that belonged to its users and selling them to the attacker at an extreme discount. Indexed Finance was built on the Ethereum blockchain, a public ledger where transaction details are stored, which meant there was a record of the attack. It was on October 14th 2021 in England, when crypto platform Indexed Finance was hacked by a then 18-year-old math prodigy.

How to use prodigy hacks