Crypto trading firm Wintermute has been the victim of a $160 million hack
Crypto trading platform Wintermute just lost $160 million in a hack involving the decentralized finance operation (DeFi).
This news was confirmed through a chirping from the company’s founder and CEO, Evgeny Gaevoy.
This makes Wintermute the latest company in the industry to be the victim of a hack. A series of tweets from Gaevoy has revealed that the prominent trading firm’s decentralized financial operations have been breached.
He also clarified that the centralized finance and over-the-counter verticals had not been compromised in the hack.
He further stated that Wintermute, which counts Lightspeed Venture Partners, Pantera Capital and Fidelity’s Avon among other backers, has remained solvent with “over double that amount in equity left”.
Along with the tweets, he also mentioned that if lenders wanted to call off their loans, the trading platform would oblige.
He also added,
If you have a MM agreement with Wintermute, your money is safe. There will be a disruption to our services today and potentially for the next few days, and will return to normal afterwards.
Wintermute provides liquidity solution to over 50 crypto exchanges
Wintermute is responsible for providing liquidity to over 50 crypto exchanges and trading platforms, which include Binance, Coinbase, Kraken and FTX.
It also serves decentralized platforms such as Dydx and Uniswap. Wintermute is also an active investor and has backed startups such as Nomad, HashFlow and Ondo Finance.
It remains unclear as Evgeny Gaevoy has not revealed when exactly the hack took place or even how the perpetrators were able to carry out the hack.
There is also no update regarding law enforcement involvement.
Not just Wintermute, there is quite a long list of crypto companies that have been victims of security hacks in recent months.
For example, Crypto bridge Nomad had almost lost $200 million in the month of August before the DeFi protocol, Curve Finance, had $570,000 stolen.
Certik is also a blockchain security firm that has lost more than $1.3 billion to DeFi hacks in the past year.
The hack is a “White Hat” event
The company’s founder and CEO have stated that this hack has been treated as a “white hat” incident and even requested that the hacker contact them.
The hacker’s wallet has been tracked by a chain tracker ZachXBT. The wallet has been found to hold close to $9 million in Ethereum and $38 million in other ERC-20 tokens.
Wintermute previously experienced another mishap this year when it sent $15 million worth of Optimism (OP) tokens to the wrong address. However, the tokens were returned by the recipient.
Founded in 2017, Wintermute trades billions of dollars daily across the crypto market as a liquidity provider to multiple venues. Last week, Wintermute was named the official DeFi market maker for the Tron network.
