Curve Offers Hackers 10% Bounty in Exchange for Return of Crypto

Curve Finance and other victims of this week’s crypto lending heist have offered their hackers a 10% bounty in exchange for the return of the rest of their tokens.

“You will have no risk of us pursuing this further, no risk of law enforcement issues, etc,” Curve, Metronome and Alchemix wrote in an on-chain message sent to a hacker’s Ethereum address. The trio gave a deadline of August 6 at 0800 UTC, at which point their bounty will become a vigilante payout to whomever provides information that leads to the hacker’s arrest and conviction.

“We will pursue you from all angles with the full extent of the law,” the message said.

Curve, Metronome and Alchemix lost nearly $62 million on Sunday when an unknown hacker exploited a bug to drain many of their trading pools. While they’ve already recovered some of the tokens from front-runners who unwittingly beat out the hackers, much of the trove remains with the hackers.

The outreach efforts put Curve on a similar trajectory to Euler, another DeFi protocol that lost massive sums to hackers in 2023 and then sought, successfully, to negotiate their return.