Wintermute lost $160M in a cybersecurity breach

Wintermute, a leading crypto market maker, has lost about $160 million in a hack, a top executive said Tuesday, becoming the latest firm in the industry to suffer a breach.

Evgeny Gaevoy, the founder and chief executive of Wintermute, disclosed in a series of tweets that the firm’s decentralized finance operations had been hacked, but centralized finance and over the counter verticals aren’t affected.

He said that Wintermute — which counts Lightspeed Venture Partners, Pantera Capital and Fidelity’s Avon among its backers — remains solvent with “twice over that amount in equity left.” He assured lenders that if they wish to recall their loans, Wintermute will honor that.

“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,” he wrote.

“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.”

Wintermute provides liquidity on over 50 exchanges and trading platforms including Binance, Coinbase, FTX, Kraken as well as decentralized platforms Dydx and Uniswap. It’s also an active investor, having backed startups including Nomad, HashFlow and Ondo Finance.

Gaevoy or Wintermute did not disclose when the hack took place or the how the attackers were able to succeed, and whether it has alerted the law enforcement. journalist has reached out to Wintermute for more details.

Wintermute is the latest in a growing list of crypto firms to have suffered a hack in recent months. Hackers stole over $190 million from cross-chain messaging protocol Nomad just last month. Axie Infinity’s Ronin Bridge lost over $600 million in a hack this April, and Harmony’s Horizon bridge was drained of $100 million in June. More than $1.3 billion were lost in DeFi hack last year, according to crypto auditing platform Certik.