A Web3 developer shared the unfortunate story of losing funds after accidentally making his wallet keys publicly available on the developer platform GitHub.
On June 5, Brian Guan, co-founder of the Web3 streaming app Unlonely, shared a post on X, claiming that he lost $40,000 after making a repository on GitHub public. The developer said he forgot that his secret keys were in the repository.
When a community member inquired about how long it took for the funds to be drained, the Web3 founder responded that it took just two minutes for someone to withdraw the funds.
Cointelegraph contacted Guan for comments but has not yet received a response.
Crypto community sentiment split
When Guan’s post went viral on X, the reactions from the crypto community were mixed. Some members expressed sympathy for the developer and offered support, while others unearthed Guan’s past comments about developers using OpenAI’s chatbot, ChatGPT, to write code.
A community member related to the experience and said they were sorry and hoped Guan would bounce back. However, other community members were less charitable.
In 2023, Guan posted his opinion on smart contract engineers. According to Guan, projects that pay smart contract engineers $200,000 are “ngmi,” which is short for “not gonna make it.” The Web3 founder said that any solid developer “should be able to write solidity with the help of ChatGPT.”
Because of this, community member Foobar posted a parody of Guan’s previous post, saying that if somebody is paying $200 for a hardware wallet, they’re not gonna make it and that developers should be able to store private keys in their GitHub with the help of ChatGPT.
Meanwhile, another user said that while they were sorry for what happened, Guan’s opinions on developers reeked of “Gen Z entitlement.”
Related: Japanese exchange DMM loses $305M in Bitcoin via private key hack
ChatGPT-coded memecoin surges
While using ChatGPT to code may still be controversial to many, a memecoin coded using the artificial intelligence chatbot has already found success within the crypto space. On May 28, prices for a memecoin called Turbo reached a new all-time high, pushing its market capitalization over $600 million.
Digital artist Rhett Mankind created the memecoin in April 2023 using ChatGPT. Mankind used prompts to guide ChatGPT in creating what he called “the next great” memecoin.
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