Hackers Steal $160M From Wintermute: Is This DeFi Breach A White Hat Scenario?

Algorithmic market maker service Wintermute experienced a security compromise on Tuesday, and hackers stole almost $160 million from the platform's portfolio of 90 assets.

Wintermute CEO Evgeny Gaevoy stated that its decentralized finance (DeFi) activities were hacked for roughly $160 million and that the company was open to considering the hack a "white hat" scenario.

That means the hacker returns the money and is paid for identifying a flaw.

Wintermute's centralized finance (CeFi) and OTC operations were unaffected, Gaevoy added. While the hacker took almost $160 million, only two of the 90 assets hacked were worth more than $1 million and none were worth more than $2.5 million.

Users, lenders, and partners of the platform should anticipate complete normalcy in operations over the next few days, Gaevoy said.

The company was "solvent with twice over that amount in equity left," he said.

Twitter users discovered suspicious activity involving Wintermute on Tuesday, Sept. 20.

Following Gaevoy's disclosure, on-chain sleuth ZachXBT asserted to have discovered the hacker's wallet address. This wallet contains $47.8 million, with the remaining $114.3 million being held by the decentralized stablecoin exchange Curve Protocol, according to ZachXBT.

The wallet in question had made 45 transactions over the course of five hours, according to further investigation on the blockchain exploration platform EtherScan.

It also holds a variety of 80 tokens, including $12.9 million in Wrapped Bitcoin WBTC/USD, $3.9 million in Pax Dollar USDP/USD, and $2.3 million in Somnium Space CUBE/USD tokens, among others.

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