Crypto Market Maker Wintermute Suffers $160M Hack, Claims Funds ‘Safe’

Digital asset algorithmic market maker Wintermute has been exploited for approximately $160 million in its decentralized finance operations, according to founder and CEO Evgeny Gaevoy. 

He added that Wintermute’s centralized finance and over the counter operations were unaffected, and that it managed to avoid insolvency. “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.” 

In the announcement, Gaevoy acknowledged that 90 assets had been hacked, but that only two among them were found to be worth over $1 million, though no higher than $2.5 million.

Because of this, Gaevoy said, “there shouldn’t be a major selloff of any sort,” adding that he would communicate with the affected teams.  

Wintermute remains solvent – CEO

Gaevoy also carried several open messages in the announcement. Reiterating that Wintermute remains solvent, Gaevoy stated that lenders are still more than welcome to recall their loans if they feel it is safer. The chief executive said the company is still open to treating the incident as a “white hat” attack, in which a hacker exploits a system in order to expose its flaws, and requested the hacker reach out.

On-chain investigator ZachXBT tracked down the hacker’s wallet, which currently holds around $9 million in ether (ETH) and $38 million in other ERC20 tokens.

Gaevoy concluded saying there would be a further disruption in services from today into the coming few days, in order to “get back to normal.” Via Telegram, Gaevoy confirmed that the tweets were accurate but had no further comment.

Wintermute was founded in 2017 and provides liquidity across multiple venues, facilitating the trading of billions of dollars of cryptocurrency on a daily basis.

Last week, the Tron network named Wintermute as its official market maker. Unfortunately, the firm had already suffered a mishap earlier this year, having sent $15 million of Optimism (OP) tokens to a wrong address, though they were eventually returned by the recipient.