The Euler Finance hacker returned most of the funds they stole earlier this month in a $197 million flash loan exploit, which was dubbed the biggest decentralized finance hack of 2023 so far.
DeFi Hacker Returns Loot
In the last few hours, the hacker who used flash loans to nab a variety of assets from Euler Finance has returned nearly all of the stolen funds to the crypto lending platform.
On March 25, roughly 51,000 ether worth almost $ 89 million were returned to Euler Finance’s deployer address from the Euler Finance hacker’s address. Blockchain investigator Peckshield identified one transaction that was used to send the funds. A second transfer of 7,737 ether, valued at over $12 million was made hours later.
Notably, the hacker also made other multiple outbound transactions that moved tens of millions of decentralized dai stablecoins to another wallet. It remains unclear as to why the anonymous attacker decided to return the funds.
https://t.co/Jowhml2tAZ https://t.co/0S5dpaRVSr pic.twitter.com/Ei6Pv8qQju
— PeckShield Inc. (@peckshield) March 25, 2023
Euler Finance is a borrowing and lending platform for cryptocurrencies, allowing users to earn interest for adding various assets to the protocol.
On March 13, a hacker nabbed $8.7 million in DAI stablecoin, $18.5 million in Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC), a whopping $135.8 million in Staked Ethereum (stETH), and another $33.8 million in Circle’s USD stablecoin USDC, and later used a multichain bridge to transfer the funds from the BNB Chain to Ethereum.
Days after the hack, the Euler Finance team sent an on-chain message offering the hacker a deal to keep 10% of the nearly $200 million stolen if they returned the remainder within 24 hours. When no response was received, Euler Finance publicly announced a $1 million bounty reward for information leading to the attacker’s capture and the recovery of all funds. Nonetheless, the bad actor was unfazed by the ultimatum and instead sent some funds to Tornado Cash, a now-blacklisted mixer on ethereum for preserving transaction privacy.
According to blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis, 2022 was the biggest year for cryptocurrency hacks and exploits, with at least $3.8 billion stolen across different protocols.
The Euler Finance team has not yet made an official statement to update the community. That being said, Euler’s native EUL token has surged 32.68% over the last 24 hours.
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