Cryptocurrency company Wintermute has been “hacked for approximately $160 million,” according to its founder and CEO, Evgeny Gaevoy.
It’s the latest multimillion-dollar hack in the decentralized finance (DeFi) space and follows $625 million stolen from Ronin Network in March in a hack the US later blamed on North Korea.
More recently, the company Nomad – which provides a bridging service between different blockchains – said hackers stole nearly $200 million worth of assets.
In a thread on TwitterGaevoy said the hack hit the company’s DeFi operations but did not affect its CeFi (centralized finance) or OTC (over-the-counter) services.
Gaevoy warned customers that there was a disruption in Wintermute’s services “today and possibly for [the] next few days and after that it will be back to normal.”
Wintermute is a “market maker” for cryptocurrency platforms, an organization that holds a large inventory of a particular asset to keep the market liquid by ensuring that traders have someone to buy and sell with.
Last week, it announced an agreement with the TRON network and blockchain, which offers services aimed at suppressing the potentially manipulative effect large traders can have on asset prices while trading.
The CEO added that of the 90 assets the hackers stole, only two had an assumed value of more than $1 million.
He did not name the tokens, but said that neither was hit for more than $2.5 million and, as such, did not expect the breach to result in a large selloff of any kind.
“We will communicate with both affected teams as soon as possible,” he added.
Gaevoy stressed the company remains “solvent” with “twice more” the amount stolen, adding: “We are (still) open to treating it as a white hat [incident]so if you are the attacker — get in touch.”
In August 2021, a hacker stole assets worth more than $600 million from the Poly Network. After the breach and negotiations with Poly, the hacker – who called himself Mr White Hat – returned the funds in exchange for a financial reward.
It is not clear who is behind the hack on Wintermute and no hacker has yet publicly claimed to highlight security issues at the company.
