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Hacked Crypto Market Maker Wintermute Has $200M in Outstanding DeFi Debt
The firm's CEO described the company as solvent following the $160 million hack.
Updated May 11, 2023, 5:53 p.m. Published Sep 20, 2022, 8:43 p.m.
Cryptocurrency market maker Wintermute, the victim of Tuesday's $160 million hack, has over $200 million in outstanding DeFi debt to several counterparties, according to on-chain data.
The largest debt involves a $92 million tether loan issued by TrueFi, which is due to mature on Oct. 15.
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Wintermute's loan book also includes a $75 million debt, comprised of USDC and wrapped ether (WETH), owed to Maple Finance and a $22.4 million debt owed to Clearpool. CoinDesk tracked Wintermute's holdings using an address attributed to the market maker by the data site Nansen.
London-based Wintermute, which trades billions of dollars everyday across multiple crypto venues, became the latest company to get hit by a wave of hacks across the decentralized finance ecosystem on Tuesday. 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.
In a tweet thread following the hack, Wintermute CEO Evgeny Gaevoy insisted that the company remains solvent and that it has "twice over" the amount of equity that was stolen.
"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.
As much of the issued debt is in stablecoins, it is unclear whether Wintermute's description of "equity" covers digital assets.
The hacker sent $111 million to Curve Finance's 3pool with some suggesting that this was done to avoid stablecoins being frozen by issuers Tether and Circle.
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 did not immediately respond to CoinDesk's request for comment.
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