Looter Behind $61M Curve Hack Starts Returning Assets, Raising Hope for Recovery

The exploiter responsible for draining $61 million assets held on decentralized exchange Curve Finance has returned some of the stolen crypto after engaging in talks with one of the victims on Friday, blockchain data shows.

In a message linked to an Ethereum blockchain transaction, the looter asked Alchemix, one of the victims of the heist, to confirm the protocol's address where he could return the assets. Soon after, he transferred almost $10 million of ether (ETH) and alETH to Alchemix's multisignature wallet in multiple transactions, blockchain data on Etherscan shows.

CRV, the governance token of Curve, jumped on the news and is up 5% over the past 24 hours.

The transactions spur hope that most of the stolen assets will be recovered to victims in one of the most dramatic crypto exploit this year. Curve, Metronome and Alchemix lost $61.7 million of crypto assets over the weekend when an unknown hacker exploited a coding bug to loot multiple trading pools.

On Thursday, the affected protocols offered a 10% bounty for returning the assets by Aug. 6, CoinDesk reported.

The Curve exploit roiled the decentralized-finance sector as anxious investors yanked out assets as a precaution. CRV token's price fell as much as 31% to 50 cents in the aftermath.

Read more: DeFi Died and We Didn’t Even Notice

The plunge put Curve founder Michael Egorov's loans secured with $168 million CRV at risk of liquidating. A liquidation would have left lending protocols like Aave in distress with tens of millions in bad debt.

To avoid the near-catastrophe, Egorov sold roughly $42 million of his CRV stash including to crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun, founder of the Tron blockchain, in over-the-counter deals to pay off loans.

UPDATE (Aug. 4, 15:01 UTC): Updates total assets returned until publication. Adds context about the exploit and its aftermath.