Wintermute, Cryptocurrency Exchange, Loses $160 Million Due To DeFi Hack, OTC Service Unaffected

A top executive revealed on Tuesday that Wintermute, a prominent cryptocurrency market maker, had lost around $160 million as a result of a hack, making it the most recent company in the sector to have a breach.

Wintermute's founder and CEO, Evgeny Gaevoy, revealed in a series of tweets that the company's decentralised financial operations had been breached, but that centralised finance and over-the-counter (OTC) verticals were unaffected.

If you are a lender to Wintermute, again, we are solvent, but if you feel safer to recall the loan, we can absolutely do that

— wishful cynic (@EvgenyGaevoy) September 20, 2022

He asserted that Wintermute, which has Lightspeed Venture Partners, Pantera Capital, and Fidelity's Avon as investors, is still solvent and has "twice that amount in equity left."

He gave lenders his word that Wintermute would honour their request to recall their loans.

“If you have a MM agreement with Wintermute, your funds are safe.

"There will be a disruption in our services today and potentially for the next few days and will get back to normal after,” he wrote.

“Out of 90 assets that have been hacked only two have been for notional over $1 million (and none more than $2.5M), so there shouldn’t be a major selloff of any sort. We will communicate with both affected teams asap.”

Binance, Coinbase, FTX, Kraken, as well as the decentralised platforms Dydx and Uniswap are just a few of the roughly 50 exchanges and trading platforms on which Wintermute offers liquidity. It also invests actively, having supported businesses including Nomad, HashFlow, and Ondo Finance.

Gaevoy or Wintermute declined to say when the breach occurred, how the attackers were successful, or whether it had notified law authorities.

Wintermute has been contacted by TechCrunch for additional information.

The number of cryptocurrency companies that have recently been hacked is expanding, and Wintermute is the most recent addition.

Just last month, hackers stole more than $190 million from the Nomad cross-chain communications system.

In an April hack, Axis Infinity's Ronin Bridge lost approximately $600 million, while in a June breach, Harmony's Horizon Bridge lost $100 million.

According to crypto auditing platform Certik, the DeFi attack last year resulted in losses of more than $1.3 billion.