Stealth address privacy protocol Umbra put its hosted frontend into maintenance mode after confirming that funds stolen in recent hacks had passed through the system.
The team confirmed that roughly 349 Ethereum (ETH), worth about $800,000, came from recent “high-profile” exploits.
Umbra Responds to Laundering Reports
In a recent post on X (formerly Twitter), Umbra revealed that it made the move at 6:45 AM ET on April 21.
“As has been reported, Umbra was used to move funds associated with recent, high profile hacks. In total, we are aware of 349 ETH (~$800K) of stolen funds moving through the protocol. Reports of much higher amounts are inaccurate,” the post read.
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The team confirmed that all funds held in stealth addresses remain entirely secure and were never at risk. The Umbra protocol itself is still functioning as usual. Only their hosted instance of the frontend is offline.
Umbra added that access to the hosted frontend will be reinstated once the team is confident that bringing it back online won’t interfere with the ongoing recovery efforts.
“Umbra is primarily useful for protecting the identity of the receiver, not the sender. Since hackers want to erase the association of funds with the hack-tainted sending address, it is not particularly helpful to hackers to move the funds through Umbra. All the stolen funds moved through the protocol can be identified, and we have been in touch with security researchers who are involved,” the team added.
The response comes as investigators continue tracing the KelpDAO attacker. The hacker started laundering the funds after Arbitrum’s Security Council froze roughly $71 million worth of linked ETH. According to on-chain analyst EmberCN, a series of small ETH transfers were routed through UmbraCash.
The KelpDAO exploit, attributed to North Korea’s Lazarus Group, most likely its TraderTraitor sub-group, stands as the largest DeFi hack of 2026 to date. The incident has shaken investor confidence across the sector. It has also fueled a notable outflow of funds from Aave in recent days.
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