Shiba Inu’s core contributors and the K9 Finance DAO have escalated their recovery campaign with an on-chain ultimatum to the Shibarium bridge exploiter, deploying a new bounty contract funded with 20 ETH and broadcasting the terms directly to the attacker via Ethereum Input Data Messages (IDM).
Shiba Inu Team Drops Final 20 ETH Deal
The latest IDM, sent on November 3, 2025 at 06:32 UTC from a K9 developer-labeled account, lays out a trustless path to return frozen KNINE tokens and claim the reward before the offer decays and then expires. “Dear Shibarium Bridge Hacker… New 20 ETH bounty to return stolen KNINE tokens,” the message reads, specifying the bounty contract address and the atomic settlement flow: “Settlement is atomic when we call recoverKnine(). KNINE is transferred back to Shibarium bridge and ETH is transferred to you.” It also sets explicit time parameters: “Bounty will start to decrease in 21-days (Nov 18)… [and] will expire in 28 days (Nov 25).”
The 20 ETH bounty is escrowed on Ethereum at 0x5EA2…D4d0, a verified contract titled “KnineRecoveryBountyDecayAcceptMultiFunder,” which shows a current balance of 20 ETH and identifies k9dev.eth as the creator five days earlier. The contract’s read/write interfaces and verified source enable the attacker to permission the bounty contract to spend KNINE and, if desired, call an explicit accept() function to lock the deal before the team triggers the recoverKnine() settlement.
Public messaging from Shiba Inu developer Kaal Dhairya has amplified the urgency. In a post on X, Dhairya pressed the exploiter to take the on-chain offer: “Yo, Shibarium bridge attacker, wake up—grab free cash before the offer expires this time and do something right.” The remark follows weeks of damage-control updates about validator-key compromise and a multi-firm investigation.
K9 Finance confirms this is the final structured attempt to resolve the episode without litigation or further escalation. In an ecosystem post published by The Shib Magazine, the team states that the 20 ETH contract “makes good on a public promise… to extend one final, larger bounty offer to the entity behind the Shibarium Bridge exploit,” after an initial on-chain 5 ETH proposal in mid-September was rebuffed.
According to that account, the exploiter counter-demanded 50 ETH; K9 declined, reiterating that the KNINE at issue is blacklisted and unusable. The new contract, they add, is designed to close the loop “without direct communication” through an atomic exchange once approval is granted.
K9 has also warned the community to ignore opportunistic scams around the bounty discourse. “Watch out for scams, imposters, and malicious links. This is the last post in the thread,” the DAO wrote on X as it wrapped a public update sequence, underscoring there will be no token migration or “v2” related to this incident. The caution aims to preempt fake claim portals and phishing that often proliferate after high-profile exploits and bounty announcements.
The “last chance” framing reflects the arc of the incident since mid-September, when a flash-loan-aided validator capture enabled the attacker to authorize a malicious state and drain bridge assets, sparking a series of containment steps and an initial bounty. Contemporary coverage documented the 5 ETH on-chain offer and its 7-day decay/30-day expiry schedule; the new 20 ETH contract iterates on the same “code is law” design but with higher stakes and a shorter fuse on the decaying component.
At press time, Shiba Inu traded at $0.00000907.
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