Decentralized Finance (DeFi) market marker, Wintermute, through its Chief Executive Officer Evgeny Gaevoy announced via a Twitter thread that the protocol has been infiltrated and it has recorded a loss of $160 million in DeFi operations.
According to the CEO, its Centralized Finance (CeFi) and Over-the-Counter (OTC)operations were not affected by the hack. As a source of assurance to its customers and lenders, Gaevoy informed the public that the company is still solvent up to twice the value of the hijacked amount in equity.
Customers with MM agreements with Wintermute have been promised the safety of their funds.
Although, the company has suspended its offerings to customers to enable it to decipher the level of exposure and damage that the hack has done, and also to avoid a recurrence. The suspension is scheduled to hold for a few days after which everything will go back to normal and users can resume on the network.
Wintermute Hack May Be ‘Whitehat Hack’
In a statement issued by Gaevoy, the CEO acknowledged that about 90 assets were bridged out of which two of them account for the loss of over $1 million.
Analyzing all of those 90 assets, it was discovered that none of the assets was solely worth over $2.5 million. Hence, tracking the fund will be less complicated as any major movement of funds or selloff will raise concerns and be communicated to the affected team with immediate effect.
Evgeny Gaevoy is showing some form of optimism and is regarding the breach as a ‘whitehat hack’, an ethical security hack. Whitehat hackers aim to identify security loopholes and vulnerabilities in a network’s system.
They explore such vulnerabilities and try to replicate some of the destructive techniques a real attack might employ to hijack funds. At the end of the day, the white hat hackers return the ‘stolen’ funds back into the system network.
Just like in the case of the Nomad Bridge where whitehat hackers returned $32.6 million worth of crypto after the network was hacked and pleaded for a refund with a reward attached. In a similar fashion, Gaevoy commented that “We are (still) open to treat this as a white hat, so if you are the attacker – get in touch.”
The hacker’s wallet has been tracked and has been discovered to hold $9 million worth of Ethereum (ETH) and other ERC-20 tokens worth over $38 million.
