US authorities seize $31 million in crypto linked to 2021 Uranium Finance hack

U.S. authorities have seized $31 million worth of cryptocurrency linked to the April 2021 hack of Uranium Finance, which resulted in a loss of $50 million.

In a Monday post on X, the Southern District of New York urged victims of the Uranium Finance hack to contact law enforcement officials, as the SDNY and the Homeland Security Investigations in San Diego have confiscated $31 million in crypto believed to be connected to the hack.

Now-defunct Uranium was an automated market maker protocol deployed on the BNB chain, which was called Binance Smart Chain at the time. In April 2021, it suffered an exploit while migrating its protocol to a newer version and lost $50 million. The attackers exploited a bug in Uranium Finance’s smart contract to swap a single token for almost all other tokens in the protocol’s liquidity pool.

Though Uranium was a fork of SushiSwap, another popular decentralized exchange on Ethereum, the protocol’s team didn’t correctly adapt the code, leaving the protocol open to attack.

The exploiter initially laundered the stolen funds via crypto mixer Tornado Cash. Later, according to pseudonymous blockchain sleuth ZachXBT, they used "Magic: The Gathering" trading cards to further launder their proceeds.