Wintermute “internal system” was not effected from any hack, CEO says

Market Maker Wintermute executive confirmed that the $160 million exploit was only part of the Profanity exploit and it was totally outside of the ecosystem.

Few days ago, 1inch decentralized crypto exchange reported that ETH vanity addresses generator tool Profanity is no more safe because Private keys associated with the ETH addresses generated with Profanity were hacked by some bad actor. 

On 20 September, the CEO of Wintermute, market crypto platform, announced that it faced a loss of $160 million because the ETH wallet of Defi protocols was hacked. 

We’ve been hacked for about $160M in our defi operations. Cefi and OTC operations are not affected

— wishful cynic (@EvgenyGaevoy) September 20, 2022

On 21 September, Evgeny Gaevoy, Wintermute CEO, explained the whole thing that happened with the Wintermute ETH vault.

The CEO confirmed that the exploit was related to an ETH wallet, which was used for the Defi protocol of Wintermute, while no Defi or Cefi protocol of Wintermute were compromised. 

1. Attack vector
The attack was in relation to our wallet used for DeFi proprietary trading operations, which are completely separate and independent from our CeFi and OTC operations

— wishful cynic (@EvgenyGaevoy) September 20, 2022

He also explained that the Profanity tool was used to show the “optimised gas” not to show off. Further he explained that they took action on behalf of the 1inch alert news on Profanity tool exploit and accelerated the “old key” retirement.

In the last phase of this incident explanation, Wintermute CEO said that a human error took place which has called a wrong function, So the team blacklisted the router instead of the operator.

3. And such is a challenge of running a (truly) automated Market Maker in the Dark Forest. You must automate processes as much as possible as multisig solutions are not applicable to our way of high speed trading

— wishful cynic (@EvgenyGaevoy) September 20, 2022

Wintermute also confirmed that the team is strong & healthy in terms of financial power, so Wintermute users don’t need to worry about this thing and all the operations will run smoothly.

We have strong financials behind our operations and we will continue delivering top class professional and reliable service to our partners.

— Wintermute (@wintermute_t) September 21, 2022

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