Wintermute hack costs $160M

Hit for $160 Million Wintermute

The hacking of Wintermute for the amount of 160 million dollars has been confirmed by Evgeny Gaevoy, the founder and CEO of the company.

During a Twitter storm on Tuesday, Gaevoy revealed that the market maker had suffered a loss in the nine-figure range as a result of its DeFi operations. He went on to say that the company was still profitable and that its centralized and over-the-counter services had not been affected in any way. In his email, he reassured customers that the money they had deposited would be secure by writing, “We are solvent with over twice [the amount stolen] in equity left.”

According to Gaevoy, there were ninety different assets taken. Two of the sums that were misplaced had a combined value of between one million and two and a half million dollars. The earnings from the remaining 88 came to less than one million dollars in each case.

One of the most prominent market makers in the cryptocurrency industry is Wintermute. It does this by increasing the amount of liquidity that is available in markets across both centralized and decentralized trading venues. In addition to that, it provides an over-the-counter service to clients who have high net worth as well as institutional customers.

Mudit Gupta, the chief information security officer for Polygon, tweeted about the hack early on Tuesday morning, saying that he believed it was “a hot wallet compromise.” Gupta brought up the fact that Wintermute had just recently disclosed a profanity bug, which may have been the impetus for some hackers to go after the company.

On-chain researcher zachxbt tweeted a link to the hacker’s wallet, which led to an Ethereum address that, according to the data provided by Zapper, is currently holding digital assets with a value of 163 million dollars. Approximately seventy percent of the funds have been added to Curve Finance’s tricrypto pool. This is a common tactic used by hackers who do not intend to return the stolen funds (stablecoin issuers like Circle and Tether are unable to freeze funds once they are added to decentralized exchange liquidity pools).

Gaevoy then said that the company would be happy to treat the incident as a white hat attack, and he invited the person who was responsible for the hack to come forward. This statement brought the announcement of the hack to a close.

After zachxbt publicized the address, an interesting phenomenon occurred: multiple crypto users communicated with the attacker through on-chain messages. “look like you start approving the contract to dump now, please think about that and return,” one person wrote. “look [sic] like you start approving the contract to dump now.”