Hackers hacked the cryptocurrency market maker Wintermute and stole about $160 million worth of assets, platform founder Evgeny Gayevoy said on Twitter (the social network is blocked in Russia). He also said that the company remains solvent because it has twice as much money on its balance sheet as was stolen.
Wintermute is a market maker that provides liquidity to more than 50 cryptocurrency platforms such as Binance, Kraken, FTX, Coinbase and others. In addition, in early August, the firm became a member of TRON DAO Reserve, the organization behind the USDD algorithmic staplecoin, gaining the right to issue and burn the project's token.
The attack resulted in the theft of 90 different assets used in DeFi's services. Only two of those were stolen for more than $1 million, but not more than $2.5 million, so there shouldn't be any major sell-offs, Gaevoy said. Assets related to centralized service operations (CeFi) and over-the-counter (OTC) activities were not affected.
The developer warned that there may be platform outages today, Sept. 20, and for a few days, then services will be restored. The platform also remains open to dialogue with crackers: if attackers connect, Wintermute is ready to treat the attack as a white hat job.
In early August, Nomad Bridge was hacked, resulting in the theft of about $152 million. The developers offered the attackers to return the stolen funds for a reward, which resulted in more than $36.3 million in various cryptocurrencies being returned to Nomad by "white hat" hackers.
