Crypto Hack: DeFi Market Maker Wintermute Loses $160 Million In Hacking

Wintermute has announced a 10 percent bounty on the stolen funds for the hacker, if the entire amount is returned.

Founded in 2017, Wintermute trades billions of dollars across crypto market daily.

New Delhi: Leading cryptocurrency market maker Wintermute has lost $160 million in a hacking attack on its decentralised finance (DeFi) operation, the company's CEO said on Tuesday.

In a tweet, the company's founder and CEO Evgeny Gaevoy said that they have been hacked for about $160 million in their DeFi operations.

"Cefi (centralised finance) and OTC (over-the-counter) operations are not affected. We are solvent with twice over that amount in equity left," he posted.

Wintermute has Lightspeed Venture Partners, Pantera Capital, and Fidelity's Avon among as its investors.

Staying bold in our approach helped us grow to where we are now – being one of the very few crypto native prop trading shops that could take a punch like this and not just survive, but keep pushing forward

— wishful cynic (@EvgenyGaevoy) September 20, 2022

"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," Gaevoy tweeted.

"Out of 90 assets that has been hacked only two have been for notional over $1 million (and none more than $2.5M), so there shouldn't be a major selloff of any sort. We will communicate with both affected teams asap," he further added.

Gaevoy said that the platform will treat this as a white hack and announced a bounty of 10 percent on the stolen funds for the hacker.

We are working on multiple leads, both internally and externally and would prefer to resolve this in a simple way, but the window of opportunity to do so is closing fast due to the high profile of this exploit

— wishful cynic (@EvgenyGaevoy) September 20, 2022

Founded in 2017, Wintermute trades billions of dollars across crypto market daily as it provides liquidity across multiple venues.

Last week, it was named as the official DeFi market maker for the Tron network, reports CoinDesk.

The platform suffered a big goof-up earlier this year when it sent $15 million of Optimism (OP) tokens to a wrong address. The tokens were eventually returned by the recipient.

(With inputs from IANS)

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