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With each passing day, the $197 million Euler Finance scam becomes more shocking. According to the most recent information on the greatest decentralized finance theft of 2023, more than 50% of the funds that were taken have been recovered.
On March 25, a little amount of ETH—about 51,000—worth over $89 million was moved from the hacker’s address at Euler Finance back to the deployer address. A few hours later, the exploiter made a second transfer of 7737 ETH, totaling roughly $13 million.
The hacker submitted 3,000 ETH, which was then valued around $5.4 million, to the lending protocol a week ago. At the time of writing, part of the stolen money was still under the hacker’s hands.
On March 13, a flash loan attack on the Ethereum-based DeFi protocol succeeded in draining assets worth $197 million in Dai, USD CoiN [USDC], staked Ether [StETH], and wrapped Bitcoin [WBTC].
After failing to reach a common ground, Euler issued a $1 million reward for any information regarding the hacker.
The hacker claimed they now want to “come to an agreement” with the loan protocol in an on-chain message to Euler on March 20.
Since 2021, DeFi protocols have grown remarkably, and the amount of money put into their smart contracts has skyrocketed.
However, because of the increase in liquidity, they have also been able to attract the interest of dishonest players.
At the time of writing, $6.45 billion in value has been compromised, according to DeFiLlama. The worst year on record for DeFi protocols was 2022, when they lost more than $3 billion.
Although there was a noticeable gap in activity throughout the months of December and January, hackers later emerged to severely damage the DeFi sector.
Seven procedures were hacked in February, and as a result, $21 million in money was taken. One of the biggest was the Platypus Finance flash loan reentrancy attack, in which hackers stole $8.5 million.
Notably, the private key compromise was responsible for 16% of the breaches. Additionally, when the protocols were attacked by access control flaws, about 8% of the cash were stolen.
