Another day, yet another hack of a company involved in an initial coin offering. Veritaseum Inc., a company attempting to raise funds, was hacked on Sunday to the tune of $8.4 million in stolen tokens.

The company, which appears to be looking to develop a “proprietary P2P smart contract” platform that combines “the transformational power of the blockchain [to] allow the entire world to participate in the reimagining of global capital markets,” launched its ICO April 25. It had been going reasonably well, until it gained the attention of hackers over the weekend.

From varied reports, it would appear that the hackers did not steal Ethereum tokens, as was the case with previous ICO-related hack. Instead, they stole the equivalent of $8.4 million VERI tokens being sold by Veritaseum. Strangely, the hackers, sold those tokens on the open market to raise funds in actual Ethereum tokens.

The announcement that the company had been hacked was made by founder Reggie Middleton, who instead of providing details on the company’s own site took to the Bitcointalk forum instead.

“We were hacked, possibly by a group,” Middleton wrote. “The hack seemed to be very sophisticated, but there is at least one corporate partner that may have dropped the ball and be liable. We’ll let the lawyers sort that out, if it goes that far. The hacker(s) made away with $8.4M worth of tokens, and dumped all of them within a few hours into a heavy cacophony of demand.”

Valiantly casting the hack as potentially a positive, Middleton noted, “Although I hate to see assets stolen, and I hate thieves, the incident proved both the resilient demand for our tokens and the utility of the decentralized exchange EtherDelta.”

Middleton ruled out forking the code base for the VERI tokens to cancel out the stolen tokens. He said that “at the end of the day, the amount stolen was minuscule (less than 0.07 percent) although the dollar amount was quite material.” Based on that figure, the paper value of all tokens held by Veritaseum is a staggering $12 billion – which is either representative of the madness running through ICOs at the moment or that Middleton has made a mistake with his numbers.

The hack of Veritaseum follows a number of ICO-related hacks with $7 million in Ethereum tokens being stolen from CoinDash July 17 followed by $31 million, again in ETH tokens, being stolen from three companies that had recently completed ICOs a week ago. The Veritaseum hack may be notable in that it’s the first time hackers have stolen tokens instead of the Ethereum being used to acquire the tokens on offer.

Image: Veritaseum