Wintermute, a cryptocurrency market maker, has become the latest victim of hackers as $160 million worth of digital currencies were siphoned from its decentralized finance (DeFi) operations.
The founder and CEO Evgeny Gaevoy confirmed the hack with a tweet and also revealed that its lending and over-the-counter (OTC) services were not affected.
We’ve been hacked for about $160M in our defi operations. Cefi and OTC operations are not affected
— wishful cynic (@EvgenyGaevoy) September 20, 2022
Gaevoy further highlighted that the company is “solvent with twice over” $160 million in “equity left.”
“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,” he added.
“If you are a lender to Wintermute, again, we are solvent, but if you feel safer to recall the loan, we can absolutely do that.”
The crypto startup is also considering the cyberattack as a white hat incident and urged the attacker to get in touch.
According to Etherscan, more than 70 different digital currencies were transferred to the Wintermute exploiter’s wallet. More than $61 million in USDC tokens were siphoned off, followed by $29.4 million in Ether and roughly $13 million in Wrapped Bitcoin.
This year too, hackers managed to siphon off hundreds of millions of dollars from DeFi platforms. Crypto bridge Nomad lost around $200 million in August to hackers followed by the $570,000 hack of DeFi protocol Curve Finance.