Wintermute repays $92M TrueFi loan on time despite suffering $160M hack
When Wintermute, a cryptocurrency market maker, lost $160 million due to a hack, concerns related to the repayment of debt worth $189.4 million surfaced. However, in an exciting turn of events, Wintermute paid back its largest debt due Oct. 15, involving a $92 million Tether (USDT) loan issued by TrueFi.
After repayment of TrueFi’s $92 million loan, Wintermute still owes $75 million to Maple Finance in USD Coin (USDC) and wrapped ether (WETH) and $22.4 million to Clearpool, a total of $97.4 million in debt.
Loan details show that Wintermute Trading had borrowed $92.5 million for a term period of 180 days. James Edwards from Libre Blockchain suspects that “some of the funds from their recent "hack" contributed to the payback.” He further claimed that BlockSec’s attempt to debunk the conspiracy theory around an inside job theory might be a miss.
Edwards stated that BlockSec was previously “dead wrong” in calling out another firm for using the "Vanity address" tool, adding that:
“To believe that a market maker handling billions of dollars (their words) worth of crypto assets per day would use such a tool to create an address ultimately responsible for managing hundreds of millions of dollars in value is preposterous.”Supporting his claim, Edwards pointed out the GitHub URL to the vanity address tool Wintermute supposedly used to generate their vanity address, as shown below.
On Oct. 10, TrueFi issued a default notice to Blockwater Technologies for missing a scheduled payment related to a $3.4 million loan in Binance USD (BUSD).
Related: Cyber sleuth alleges $160M Wintermute hack was an inside job
Attempting remediation to a $117 million exploit, Mango Markets offered the hacker to keep $47 million as a bug bounty while requesting the return of $67 million of the stolen funds.
A majority, 98%, of the Mango Markets community approved the decision and also supported that no legal action would be taken against the hacker once the $67 million was returned.
However, some of the community members raised objections to the near $50 million bug bounty, which, in one voter's words, “is ridiculous.”