$46 million in ill-gotten crypto on the move again
Luisa Crawford Feb 14, 2023 09:10
The Wormhole hacker transferred another $46 million to MakerDAO to take advantage of arbitrage profits.
The ill-gotten cryptocurrency from one of the industry's major hacks is on the move again, with on-chain data suggesting that another $46 million of stolen assets has been migrated from the hacker's wallet. This heist was one of the largest in the industry's history.
The Wormhole assault, which occurred in February 2022 and resulted from a vulnerability in Wormhole's token bridge, was the third-largest crypto breach that took place in 2022. Wrapped Ethereum (wETH) valued at around $321 million was taken.
PeckShield, a company that specializes in blockchain security, reports that the hacker's connected wallet has been active once again, and it has moved $46 million worth of cryptocurrency assets.
This was comprised of about 24,400 Ethereum staking tokens wrapped by Lido Finance (wstETH), which have a value of approximately $41.4 million, and 3,000 Ethereum staking tokens wrapped by Rocket Pool (rETH), which have a value of around $5 million and were relocated to MakerDAO.
According to PeckShield, the hacker seems to be looking for yield or arbitrage chances on their stolen wealth since the assets were swapped for 16.6 million DAI.
After that, the MakerDAO stablecoin was used to purchase 9,750 ETH at a price of around $1,537 and 1,000 stETH. After then, they were rewrapped into a total of 9,700 wstETH.
On February 10, a detective working on the blockchain saw that the hacker was "buying the dip."
Nevertheless, throughout the course of the previous several hours, the price of Ether (ETH) has dropped below those levels. According to CoinGecko, ETH was trading at $1,505 at the time of this writing, representing a loss of 2.6% for the day.
When the transactions were taking place, the price of stETH had depegged from that of Ethereum and had reached a high of $1,570. At the time of this writing, they were trading at $1,541, which was 2.4% higher than ETH. In addition, the price of wstETH has depegged and increased to $1,676, which is 11.3% greater than the value of the underlying asset.
The most recent transfer of cash comes only a few short weeks after the hacker transferred an additional $155 million worth of Ethereum to a decentralized exchange.
On January 24, 95,630 ETH was transferred to the OpenOcean DEX, where it was later turned into ETH-pegged assets. These ETH-pegged assets included Lido's stETH and wstETH.
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