Key Takeaways:
- The company’s lending and over-the-counter (OTC) services remain unaffected by the exploit.
- The CEO pointed out that the firm is solvent with twice the amount in equity.
Leading cryptocurrency market maker Wintermute has lost around $160 million in a hack relating to its decentralized finance (DeFi) operation, revealed the company’s founder and CEO Evgeny Gaevoy.
Evgeny has further added that the company’s lending and over-the-counter (OTC) services remain unaffected by the exploit.
The CEO pointed out that the firm is solvent with twice the amount in equity. Gaevoy added that the firm is still treating the hack as a “white hat” event and asked the hacker to get in touch.
The hacker’s wallet has been tracked down by an on-chain sleuth and Twitter user ZachXBT, it currently holds approximately $9 million in ether and $38 million in other erc-20 tokens.
Wintermute is yet to reveal important details about the hack, including when the hack took place or how the hackers were able to succeed, and whether the company has alerted law enforcement.
Wintermute has also suffered similar exploits in the past. In June this year, the firm accidentally sent $15 million of Optimism (OP) tokens to the wrong address. The tokens were eventually returned by the recipient.
Wintermute CEO Evgeny Gaevoy also took responsibility for allowing the theft then, saying that “we made a serious error.”
The latest news comes a week after the blockchain network Tron decided to name Wintermute as the DeFi ecosystem’s official market maker to help boost trading volumes.
Wintermute will provide stability for Tron’s native TRX tokens and liquidity for major TRX trading pairs across various exchanges.
Wintermute, founded in 2017, provides liquidity on over 50 exchanges and trading platforms, including big shots like Binance, Coinbase, FTX, and Kraken, as well as decentralized platforms Dydx and Uniswap.
The year 2022 has witnessed many exploits and hacks in the digital asset/Web3 space. According to the Chainalysis crypto crime report, around 97% of all cryptocurrency stolen in the first three months of 2022 has been taken from DeFi protocols, up from 72% in 2021 to just 30% in 2020.
Last month, the Nomad token bridge was hacked in a nearly $200 Million exploit. In August, hackers plundered around $570,000 from DeFi protocol Curve.Finance.
