The Decision

Around 7 PM Dubai time on December 11, 2025, I get a notification that someone deposited funds into one of my dormant wallets. I know what's about to happen.

I look at the chart. The chart is burning. I see the real-time drain of the wallets, one after another.

My kids are around me. They're looking at their father in devastation.

The amount, in absolute terms, is about seventy thousand dollars. It doesn't kill me. It doesn't end the project. But the feeling of being violated — of watching everything I'd been building for six months break in six minutes — is one of the biggest things I've ever lived through.

I open my phone. I have ten treasury wallets, not one. Months earlier I'd split the treasury supply across multiple wallets specifically so a single compromise couldn't take everything at once. Each wallet holds only ZARO — no ETH, no BNB, no gas. The hacker has to deposit ETH into each wallet before he can move the ZARO out of it. That's the road block. That's what's slowing him down. That's the only thing buying me time.

So I do the only thing I can do. I create a temporary wallet. I watch for the hacker to dump ZARO into the Uniswap pool — the pool is safe, the supply that goes through the pool is buyable by anyone — and the moment he sells, ETH comes out the other side and I race him for it.

I'm switching between ten wallets on my phone, trying to spot a glimpse of ETH appearing in a wallet that had only ZARO a second ago. When I see it, I know that wallet has just been gas-funded by the hacker. The next move from that wallet is going to be a ZARO dump. I have seconds.

I have to steal my own money from my own wallet and race him to whatever ETH he just generated.

The big chunk was lost before I caught up. Then the BSC and Solana bridged assets drained too. He took ETH. He took BNB. He took USDT. If anyone traces the hashes and wallets later, the fight has a timeline. My temp-wallet purchases are interleaved with the drain transactions on Etherscan. It's all there.

A friend comes over. He helps me think. He helps me regroup. I'm shivering.

The structural defenses I'd built took six months to construct and they did what they were designed to do. The renounced contract held. The 255-year LP lock held. The ten-wallet treasury structure slowed the attack by orders of magnitude. The bridge backing on Ethereum was never at risk. Everything that was engineered to be unbreakable was, in fact, unbreakable.

What I didn't anticipate was a Trojan horse. The breach didn't come through the wallet infrastructure. It came through a piece of malware delivered as a beautiful website pretending to be an AI tool. The vector was a door I'd opened myself, on my own machine, because the wrapping looked legitimate.

Around 6 AM Dubai time on December 12, after no sleep, I write a message and send it to everyone I know. I also post a version of it on X. The message goes out before any of the criminal reports are filed, before the forensic firm is engaged, before the buyback begins. It's the first move of the response, written in the wreckage:

Dear friends,

I wanted you to hear this directly from me.

Earlier this evening, around 7:00 PM on December 11, 2025, my Google email account was breached. Someone with clear criminal intentions gained access and used it to reach wallets holding my ZARO, then sold a large amount very quickly on the market. That's what caused the sudden price drop.

We are already filing official crime reports and informing exchanges and platforms so the addresses involved can be flagged and monitored.

For me, the real question is how we move forward from here.

ZaroVerse was never meant to be "just a coin". The goal has always been to build a long-term entertainment company — stories, animation, parks, and products around Zaro. This incident hasn't weakened that plan; it has given us even more motivation to push forward with real-world projects and show the world a new kind of entertainment company.

One day, this will most likely be part of the "early days" chapter in a future ZARO movie.

From day one, the ZARO token was created as a limited-edition way to be close to the project — something people chose to buy on their own to be part of the early story. Because this supply is limited and very dear to the company, we want to both respect early supporters and bring more of these tokens back closer to ZaroVerse.

So, for anyone who bought ZARO before 11 December 2025, we are now making a voluntary offer through a simple form:

1 — We are prepared to buy your ZARO from you.

If you bought before 11 December 2025 and can show proof of what you paid, ZaroVerse is prepared to buy your ZARO directly from you, based on the amount you originally paid (subject to basic checks).

The agreed amount will be recorded as a personal credit in your name. You can then choose what to do with that credit: receive it in cash or USDT, or use it later to subscribe for future shares in ZaroVerse on the same price and terms as new investors, once our legal structure for equity is finalized.

2 — You can also simply keep your ZARO.

If you are happy to hold your ZARO and do nothing, that is completely your choice. The token remains limited edition, and we have plans to use it inside the wider ZaroVerse story over time. This offer is there to give options and safety to early supporters, not to create panic.