Cryptocurrency trading company Wintermute stolen by hackers 160 million USD

On Twitter, Wintermute CEO Evgeny Gaevoy said hackers had targeted Wintermute’s decentralized finance operations in London.

Mr. Gaevoy said the company’s financial position is still stable, but if Wintermute’s loan partners want to recover the loan, the company fully respects this decision. According to Mr. Gaevoy, Wintermute’s service may be disrupted for the next few days.

Decentralized finance (DeFi) software and platforms have often been targeted by hackers in recent years due to their particularity of being a form of finance that allows users to transact directly with each other through blockchain, instead of depending on traditional financial institutions. The sector is poorly regulated and victims rarely recover stolen assets.

The company Wintermute claims to be “one of the biggest players” in the global crypto market, providing liquidity on over 50 exchanges and trading platforms including Binance, Coinbase, FTX, Kraken as well as like the Dydx and Uniswap decentralized platforms.

Wintermute is the latest company in the list of victims of recent cyber attacks. Last month, hackers stole more than $190 million from company Nomad’s cross-chain messaging protocol. In April, the Ronin network developed for the online game Axie Infinity was also attacked by hackers and damaged more than 600 million USD.

According to crypto auditing platform Certik, the total value of cryptocurrencies stolen in cyberattacks in 2021 is about more than $1.3 billion.