Cryptocurrency market maker Wintermute, victim to the $160 million dollar exploit earlier this week, was found to have nearly $200 million in outstanding DeFi debt to several counterparties, according to on-chain data.
The debts involving Wintermute includes a $92 million tether (USDT) issued by TrueFi, set to mature on October 15. It also owes a $75 million debt comprising USDC and wrapped ether (WETH) to Maple Finance, and a $22.4 million debt owed to Claerpool.
Wintermute, London-based market maker, trades billions of dollars everyday across multiple crypto venues, and was the latest company to fall victim to a wave of exploits across the DeFi ecosystem. In August, cross-chain bridge Nomad had $190 million drained after hackers exploited a vulnerability, with $1.9 billion being stolen in hacks in the first half of this year, according to analytics firm Chainalysis.
Winter CEO Evgeny Gaevoy said in a Tweet thread that the company was solvent with “twice over that amount in equity left”. But it is unsure at this point that whether “equity” covers digital assets
“If you are a lender to Wintermute, again, we are solvent, but if you feel safer to recall the loan, we can absolutely do that,” Gaevoy said in a tweet.
It is suspected that the hacker sought to avoid stablecoins being frozen by issuers Tether and Circle by sending $111 million to Curve Finance’s 3pool.
It’s not uncommon for crypto market makers and trading firms to carry debt owed to projects in the course of billions of dollars of daily trades. For example, Alameda currently owes TrueFi $18 million; the trading giant has previously repaid $484 million to the DeFi credit protocol.
Wintermute has previously mistakenly sent $15 million worth of Optimism (OP) tokens to a wrong address, which were eventually returned by the recipient.
