Bored Ape Maker Yuga Labs Rescues Dozens of Ethereum NFTs From Exploit
The Bored Ape Yacht Club creator now holds more than 60 rescued NFTs in its custody as it works to return them to their rightful owners.
By Logan HitchcockEdited by Andrew HaywardJun 8, 2026Jun 8, 20263 min read
In brief
- Yuga Labs operated a whitehat hacking operation on Sunday, saving more than $500,000 worth of NFTs from being stolen in an exploit.
- The exploit impacted defunct NFT liquidity project Floor Protocol.
- Yuga Labs maintains custody of the NFTs as 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, rescued approximately $570,000 worth of NFTs from an exploit that affected the defunct liquidity platform Floor Protocol on Sunday.
The whitehat operation, which led to the rescue of 29 Bored Apes and two CryptoPunks, among others, was conducted by the NFT firm after it discovered a morning exploit on Floor Protocol could be extended to other significant collections, like its Bored Apes.
“After digging deeper, we found another related exploit path that could be used against additional vulnerable Flooring pools,” said 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,” 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 sunset its 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 NFT.
The exploit allowed the attackers to change a small portion of wrapped Ethereum (wETH) into a nearly infinite μToken balance, which could ultimately be used to drain the NFT 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 is currently maintaining control of the assets as it seeks to work with Floor Protocol developers to find a solution and return the NFTs to their rightful owners.
“Thanks to this move, we were able to save dozens of assets from impacting the market and Flooring protocol tokens from being compromised,” Yuga Labs CEO Michael Figge posted on X.
The NFT market has cooled considerably since early 2022, when Bored Apes routinely traded above $300,000. At that time, daily sales volumes for Ethereum NFTs routinely exceeded more than $100 million per day according to data from CryptoSlam. By comparison, the top sales volume day in 2026 stands at just $32.3 million.
Despite the lack of interest, some top NFTs still trade for considerable sums. For example, Bored Apes still hold a floor price—or the lowest listed asset on a marketplace—of more than $15,000, according to NFT Price Floor. Meanwhile, CryptoPunks trade for a minimum of around $55,000.
