Summary
- On Sunday, Yuga Labs executed a whitehat hacking initiative, successfully recovering over $500,000 in NFTs from a security breach.
- The breach affected the now-defunct NFT liquidity platform, Floor Protocol.
- Yuga Labs is currently holding the NFTs while seeking a way to return them to their rightful owners.
Yuga Labs, known for the Ethereum NFT series Bored Ape Yacht Club, managed to recover around $570,000 worth of NFTs during an exploit that impacted the now-defunct Floor Protocol liquidity platform on Sunday.
The whitehat effort led to the recovery of 29 Bored Apes and two CryptoPunks, among other assets, after Yuga Labs identified that the exploit could potentially extend to other prominent collections, including its own.
“After digging deeper, we found another related exploit path that could be used against additional vulnerable Flooring pools,” explained 0xQuit, a pseudonymous VP of Blockchain at Yuga Labs, on X.
“The objective was to extract exposed NFTs from the vulnerable Flooring pools before another malicious actor could exploit the same vulnerabilities and seize them,” they added.
2/ After analyzing the bug more closely, we found a separate but related exploitable path that put more, higher value NFTs at risk. These were not a part of the earlier exploit simply because their Uniswap pools lacked liquidity.
— Quit (@0xQuit) June 8, 2026
Floor Protocol, which ceased its operations last year, provided users with liquidity options for their NFTs by allowing deposits into “pools,” where they could earn fungible μTokens to trade on decentralized exchanges or redeem for the underlying NFT.
The exploit enabled attackers to convert a small amount of wrapped Ethereum (wETH) into an almost limitless μToken balance, which could then be utilized to drain NFT pools, as per 0xQuit's clarification.
“The goal was to remove exposed NFTs from vulnerable Flooring pools before another malicious actor could exploit the same paths and extract them first,” they reiterated.
Currently, Yuga Labs is retaining control over the assets while collaborating with Floor Protocol developers to devise a solution for returning the NFTs to their original owners.
“Thanks to this move, we were able to save dozens of assets from impacting the market and Flooring protocol tokens from being compromised,” stated Yuga Labs CEO Michael Figge on X.
The NFT market has significantly cooled since early 2022, when Bored Apes regularly sold for over $300,000. During that period, daily sales volumes for Ethereum NFTs consistently surpassed $100 million, according to CryptoSlam data. In contrast, the highest sales volume day in 2026 recorded only $32.3 million.
Despite the decreased interest, some high-profile NFTs continue to command substantial prices. For instance, Bored Apes maintain a floor price of over $15,000, while CryptoPunks have a minimum trading price of approximately $55,000.