Wintermute, a leading crypto market maker, has lost about $160 million in a hack, a chief executive said Tuesday, making it the latest company in the industry to suffer a breach.
Evgeny Gaevoy, the founder and chief executive of Wintermute, revealed in a series of tweets that the company’s decentralized financial operations had been hacked, but centralized finance and over-the-counter verticals were unaffected.
He said Wintermute — which counts Lightspeed Venture Partners, Pantera Capital and Fidelity’s Avon among its lenders — remains solvent with “twice that amount of equity.” He assured lenders that if they want to recall their loans, Wintermute will honor it.
“If you have an MM agreement with Wintermute, your money is safe. There will be an outage in our services today and possibly in the coming days and will return to normal after that,” he wrote.
“Of the 90 assets that were hacked, only two were at face value over $1 million (and no more than $2.5 million), so there shouldn’t be a major sell-off. We will communicate with both teams involved as soon as possible.”
Wintermute offers liquidity on more than 50 exchanges and trading platforms, including Binance, Coinbase, FTX, Kraken, as well as decentralized platforms Dydx and Uniswap. It is also an active investor and has supported startups including Nomad, HashFlow and Ondo Finance.
Gaevoy or Wintermute did not disclose when the hack took place or how the attackers succeeded, or whether it alerted law enforcement. londonbusinessblog.com has reached out to Wintermute for more details.
Wintermute is the latest in a growing list of crypto firms that have been hacked in recent months. Hackers stole more than $190 million from the cross-chain messaging protocol Nomad last month. Axis Infinity’s Ronin Bridge lost more than $600 million in a hack in April, and Harmony’s Horizon Bridge was emptied for $100 million in June. According to crypto audit platform Certik, more than $1.3 billion was lost in DeFi hack last year.