The Wormhole bridge hacker who got away with $321 million moved $155 million worth of Ether to a decentralized exchange (DEX) on January 23. This attack was the third-largest crypto hack in 2022. The protocol’s token bridge was hacked on February 2; sustained a loss of 120,000 Wrapped ETH (wETH) – worth about $321 million.
The latest activity, as per the transaction history of the hacker’s alleged wallet address, shows 95,630 ETH was sent to the open ocean DEX. It was converted into ETH-pegged assets like Lido Finance’s staked ETH (stETH) and wrapped staked ETH (wstETH). Spreekaway, a crypto community member, believes the hacker went on to conduct a slew of odd-looking transactions. The attacker used stETH holdings as collateral to borrow 13 million worth of the DAI stablecoin, swapped it for more stETH, wrapped it into stETH again, and borrowed some more DAI.
As such, the Wormhole team has again offered the hacker a bounty of $10 million if they return all the funds and leave an embedded message highlighting a transaction. Furthermore, the hacker’s hefty ETH transaction seems to have a direct impact on stETH’s price. According to data from Dune Analytics, stETH’s price went from under a peg of 0.9962 ETH on January 23 to the high of 1.0002 ETH. But it dropped back to 0.9981.
