Crypto market maker Wintermute hacked for $160 million

Quick Take

  • Crypto market making firm Wintermute has been hacked.
  • The firm maintains that it is solvent.

Crypto market making firm Wintermute has been hacked for $160 million but the firm remains solvent, according to founder and CEO Evgeny Gaevoy.

Gaevoy said today on Twitter that the money was related to its DeFi operations and that it's centralized exchange and over-the-counter offerings were not affected.

"We are solvent with twice over that amount in equity left," Gaevoy said. "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 said that 90 assets were stolen. Two amounts of tokens were worth between $1 million and $2.5 million, with the remaining below $1 million.

He added that the firm was open to treating this as a white hat hack. In this case, the firm would let the hacker keep some of the money as a bug bounty, if they returned the rest.

Via Telegram, Gaevoy confirmed that the tweets were accurate but had no further comment.

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Crypto Twitter responds

Prominent crypto individuals were quick to offer their responses to the hack.

"If it can happen to Wintermute... Stay safe. Stay paranoid," said Dragonfly Capital managing partner Haseeb Qureshi.

DeFiance Capital founder Arthur Cheong, who suffered his own hack in March, said, "Sorry to hear that, it must be extremely difficult to go through this now. Hope this will get resolved in the end."

Crypto sleuth ZachXBT, known for his long tweet threads on wrongdoing in the crypto space, provided details of the hacker's address where the stolen funds are located.


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About Author

Tim is the Editor-In-Chief of The Block. Prior to joining The Block, Tim was a news editor at Decrypt. He has earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy from the University of York and studied news journalism at Press Association Training. Follow him on X @Timccopeland.