Crypto market maker Wintermute loses $160 mn in hacking

NEW DELHI: Leading cryptocurrency market maker Wintermute has lost $160 million in a hacking into its decentralised finance (DeFi) operation, the company's CEO said on Tuesday.

In a tweet, company's founder and CEO Evgeny Gaevoy said that they have been hacked for about $160 million in their DeFi operations.

"Cefi (centralised finance) and OTC (over-the-counter) operations are not affected. We are solvent with twice over that amount in equity left," he posted.

Wintermute has Lightspeed Venture Partners, Pantera Capital and Fidelity's Avon among as its investors.

"If you have a MM agreement with Wintermute, your funds are safe. There will be a disruption in our services today and potentially for next few days and will get back to normal after," Gaevoy tweeted.

"Out of 90 assets that has been hacked only two have been for notional over $1 million (and none more than $2.5M), so there shouldn't be a major selloff of any sort. We will communicate with both affected teams asap," he further added.

Founded in 2017, Wintermute trades billions of dollars across crypto market daily as it provides liquidity across multiple venues.

Last week, it was named as the official DeFi market maker for the Tron network, reports CoinDesk.

The platform suffered a big goof-up earlier this year when it sent $15 million of Optimism (OP) tokens to a wrong address. The tokens were eventually returned by the recipient.