In short
- Yuga Labs conducted a whitehat hacking operation on Sunday, saving more than $500,000 worth of NFTs from being stolen in an exploit.
- The exploit was defunct $NFT liquidity project Floor Protocol.
- Yuga Labs will retain custody of the NFTs while it works to find a solution to return them to their rightful owners.
Yuga Labs, the team behind the Ethereum $NFT collection Bored Ape Yacht Club, on Sunday rescued about $570,000 worth of NFTs from an exploit that hit defunct liquidity platform Floor Protocol.
The white hat operation, which led to the rescue of 29 Bored Apes and two CryptoPunkswas carried out by, among others, the $NFT company after discovering that a morning exploit on Floor Protocol could be expanded to other important collections, such as the Bored Apes.
“After digging deeper, we found another related exploit path that could be used against additional vulnerable Flooring pools,” says the pseudonymous Yuga Labs VP of Blockchain 0xQuit on X.
“The goal was to remove exposed NFTs from vulnerable Flooring pools before another malicious actor could exploit the same paths and extract them first,” she added.
2/ After further analyzing the bug, we found a separate but related exploitable path that compromised more higher value NFTs. These were not part of the previous exploit simply because their Uniswap pools had no liquidity.
— Stop (@0xQuit) June 8, 2026
Floor Protocol, which ceased operations last year, allowed users to gain liquidity for their NFTs by depositing them into “pools,” earning fungible µTokens that could then be traded on a decentralized exchange or burned to redeem the underlying asset. $NFT.
The exploit allowed the attackers to convert a small portion of wrapped Ethereum (wETH) into a virtually infinite µToken balance, which could ultimately be used to $NFT swimming pools, according to 0xQuit.
“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 posted.
The Yuga Labs team currently maintains control of the assets while working with Floor Protocol developers to find a solution and return the NFTs to their rightful owners.
“Thanks to this step, we were able to prevent dozens of assets from impacting the market and the Flooring Protocol tokens from being compromised,” said Michael Figge, CEO of Yuga Labs. posted on X.
The $NFT The market has cooled significantly since early 2022, when Bored Apes was routinely trading above $300,000. According to data from CryptoSlam, daily sales volumes for Ethereum NFTs routinely exceeded $100 million per day at the time. For comparison, the highest sales volume day in 2026 is only $32.3 million.
Despite the lack of interest, some top NFTs are still trading for significant sums. For example, Bored Apes still has a floor price (or the lowest quoted asset on a marketplace) of over $15,000, according to $NFT Price floor. Meanwhile, CryptoPunks are trading for at least around $55,000.