Curve Finance offers $1.85M reward to identify attacker
Once the voluntary return period expired, the Curve team proposed a reward amounting to 10% of the remaining exploited funds
WindAwake/Shutterstock, modified by Blockworks
Curve Finance is offering a bounty of $1.85 million to anyone who can assist in identifying the person responsible for exploiting their protocol, in a manner that could culminate in a lawful conviction in court.
“If the exploiter chooses to return the funds in full, we will not pursue this further,” the team behind the DeFi protocol said on Aug. 6.
On July 30, the DeFI protocol fell victim to a software bug, resulting in the loss of more than $70 million in various digital assets.
One or more attackers took advantage of vulnerable versions of a programming language known as Vyper, using them to perform re-entrancy attacks on select Curve liquidity pools.
Curve is seen as the most structurally significant decentralized exchange in the DeFi landscape, with liquidity of $3 billion. Its importance particularly resonates in the stablecoin swap markets — an area that remained unaffected during these incidents.
On Aug. 3, Curve and other protocols impacted by the breach proposed a 10% bug bounty to the infiltrator, amounting to over $6 million.
Some of the misappropriated assets were subsequently returned to Alchemix and JPEGd, but not the other impacted pools.
According to PeckShield, 73% of stolen funds (worth about $52.3 million) have been returned as of Monday.
Following the incident, the attacker issued an on-chain message, maintaining that their decision to return the stolen assets was motivated by a desire not to inflict additional damage on the involved projects.
“I saw some ridiculous views, so i want to clarify that I’m refunding you not because you can find me, it’s because I don’t want to ruin your project, maybe it’s a lot of money for a lot of people, but not for me, I’m smarter than all of you,” the exploiter wrote in an on-chain message.
Curve’s CRV governance token is down over 6% in the last seven days, and was last trading at $0.61. Post the attack, it briefly plummeted below $0.50, amid fears that CRV collateral used on DeFi lending platforms could be liquidated en masse.
Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters:
- The Breakdown: Decoding crypto and the markets. Daily.
- 0xResearch: Alpha in your inbox. Think like an analyst.
