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Wormhole hacker moves $46 million of stolen funds

Published

2 years ago

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Source: Unsplash

  • $46 million of stolen Wormhole funds has just been transferred from the hacker’s wallet.
  • Wormhole’s token bridge was exploited in February 2022.

The stolen crypto from one of the industry’s largest exploits is on the move once more, with on-chain data revealing that another $46 million in stolen funds has just been transferred from the hacker’s wallet.

Wormhole’s token bridge was exploited in February 2022, resulting in the third-largest crypto hack last year. Wrapped ETH (wETH) worth approximately $321 million was stolen in the attack.

According to blockchain security firm PeckShield, the hacker’s associated wallet has again gotten active, transferring $46 million in cryptocurrency.

This consisted of approximately 24,400 Lido Finance-wrapped Ethereum staking token (wstETH) worth around $41.4 million and 3,000 Rocket Pool Ethereum staking token (rETH) worth around $5 million that was transferred to MakerDAO.

The analysis

According to PeckShield, the hacker appears to be looking for yield or arbitrage opportunities on their stolen loot, as the assets were exchanged for 16.6 million DAI.

The MakerDAO stablecoin was then used to purchase 9,750 ETH and 1,000 stETH, then wrapped into 9,700 wstETH.

Last week, an on-chain sleuth noticed the hacker “buying the dip.” Over the last few hours, the price of Ethereum has, however, fallen below those levels. According to CoinMarketCap, the Ethereum token was trading down 2.6% on the day at $1,505 at the time of writing.

stETH prices depegged from Ethereum and climbed as high as $1,570 at the time of the transfers. At $1,541, they are currently trading 2.4% higher than ETH. Besides, wstETH has depegged and is now worth $1,676, or 11.3% more than the underlying asset.

The latest transfer of these hacked funds comes just a few weeks after the hacker sent another $155 million in Ethereum to a decentralized exchange last month.

95,630 ETH was sent to the OpenOcean DEX and then converted into ETH-pegged assets such as Lido’s stETH and wstETH.

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