HOGE

HOGE, in early 2021, was a viral token that attracted several exuberant waves of speculative investment and awareness. For many people it created a FOMO-prompted adoption of different crypto components, including Ethereum, MetaMask, and UniSwap, and various centralized exchanges.

It is an interesting artifact of technical study because it is

  1. A fairly minimal implementation of the widely used ERC-20 token standard

  2. It implements non-trivial dynamics by which every transfer effects the balance of every wallet. In particular it does so with fairly low complexity (partially part thanks to OptiSwap's research - more on that later.)

HOGE is also an interesting psychological study because

  • it was abandoned by creators, creating a power vacuum for unsavory grifters

  • Against all odds it inspired community efforts

  • its value is completely free-floating as a UniSwap pool without an external frame of reference.

The OptiSwap team performed an internal audit and found several major issues with the contract. Fortunately they were addressable, but required a long campaign of finding and convincing the correct people.

We'll go into some of the details here.

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