Crema Finance, a DeFi project reported that it was hacked and lost more than $8.5million in assets on July 2nd. This information was released by Ottersec, an auditing firm in the blockchain ecosystem. According to Ottersec, many loan attacks had been launched to steal millions in digital currency.
After the attack, Crema suspended its loan program for a brief period to carry out investigations. On July 5th, the company announced that it was making great progress in figuring out what happened.
The company traced the hacker’s address by following the gas sources used. They were able to pinpoint an identity which looked suspicious and could have had something to do with the hack. The DeFi team later received a message from the hacker and started negotiating the return of funds.
It looks like the negotiation process was successful and the offer of a reward persuaded the hacker to return large SOL and ETH sums. The bounty offered was close to 45500 SOL. Crema confirmed the receipt of 23,967 SOL and 6064 ETH into their account, completed via 4 separate transactions.
Many DeFi protocol projects have been hacker victims in 2022 alone. In Q1 alone, over $1 billion in funds were taken from individuals, protocols and exchanges. 97% of this staggering amount was in DeFi exploits. Q2 saw another $670 million lost due to DeFi hack exploits. A lot of the stolen money in Q2 was from Harmony, Mirror, Beanstalk and Fei.
Every now and then, some of the DeFi teams get fortunate enough to negotiate and get the money back. In this case, most of the money was returned. In other cases, the projects end up losing lots of money.
