Euler Exploiter Says ‘Sorry,’ Returns Stolen $177M

The exploiter of DeFi lending protocol Euler Finance has sent a series of messages through the blockchain, apologizing for stealing funds and promising to return all stolen money. 

Euler suffered a $200 million exploit earlier this month in which a hacker used a series of flash loans to trick Euler’s smart contract into believing it had fewer collateral tokens than debt tokens. 

Now, the hacker — who goes by “Jacob” — seems to have had a change of heart.

“Jacob here. I don’t think what I say will help me in any way but I still want to say it. I fucked up. I didn’t want to, but I messed with others’ money, others’ jobs, others’ lives,” the hacker said in an encoded blockchain message, asking for forgiveness.

In its initial recovery efforts, Euler Foundation launched a $1 million reward bounty to incentivize the arrest of the attacker. 

Threats to the culprit came in from multiple angles, as an address associated with the Ronin bridge hacker — believed to be based in North Korea — attempted to trick the Euler hacker into sending over their private key information through a phishing scam.

The Euler team then sent an on-chain message to the Euler hacker, warning them of the probable phishing attempt and again urged the return of the stolen assets, noting “the simplest way out here is to return funds.”

Since then, things have taken a positive turn. On Saturday, the Euler attacker returned 51,000 ETH (about $88 million) to a wallet under the Euler team’s control, and more recently an additional four transactions of 7,800 ETH and $30 million in the DAI stablecoin has been returned to a wallet labelled Euler multisig 2, alongside a pledge to make good on all of it. 

“The rest of the money will be returned ASAP. I only look after my safety, and that is the reason for the delay. I’m sorry for any misunderstanding,” Jacob wrote in a separate on-chain message.

---

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.
• Empire: Crypto news and analysis to start your day.
• Forward Guidance: The intersection of crypto, macro and policy.
• The Drop: Apps, games, memes and more.
• Lightspeed: All things Solana.
• Supply Shock: Bitcoin, bitcoin, bitcoin.