The chief executive of a recently hacked decentralized finance (DeFi) platform is attempting to negotiate with presumed hackers after a $160 million attack.
The Wintermute DeFi platform was recently hacked and saw $160 million worth of crypto assets vanish.
According to blockchain security firm PeckShield, a large amount of stablecoins, plus some Ethereum (ETH) and Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC) made up the lions share of the missing funds.
“$160 million were stolen from Wintermute exploit, including 73% of stolen funds ($118.4 million) are stablecoins (DAI, USDT, USDC, USDP), 8% in WBTC and 6% in ETH
Etherscan shows that Wintermute exploiter is the 3rd largest holder of CRV (~$112 million).”
Wintermute founder and CEO Evgeny Gaevoy addressed the attack, and said that the firm was willing to talk to the hacker and reach a compromise.
“Short communication on the ongoing Wintermute hack:
We’ve been hacked for about $160 million in our DeFi operations. [Centralized finance] and [over-the-counter] operations are not affected.
We are solvent with twice over that amount in equity left.
If you have a MM agreement with Wintermute, your funds are safe. There will be a disruption in our services today and potentially for next few days and will get back to normal after.
Out of 90 assets that has been hacked only two have been for notional over $1 million (and none more than $2.5 million), so there shouldn’t be a major selloff of any sort. We will communicate with both affected teams ASAP.
If you are a lender to Wintermute, again, we are solvent, but if you feel safer to recall the loan, we can absolutely do that.
We are (still) open to treat this as a white hat, so if you are the attacker – get in touch.”
A white hat hack in crypto is akin to an ethical exploit – a shakedown of a system to prove its flaws rather than drain its resources.
At time of writing, the hacker has yet to respond.
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