Looter Behind $61M Curve Hack Starts Returning Assets, Raising Hope for Recovery

The exploiter responsible for draining some $61 million assets held on decentralized exchange Curve Finance has returned some of the stolen crypto after engaging in talks on Friday, blockchain data shows.

In a message linked to an Ethereum blockchain transaction, the looter asked Alchemix, one of the victims of the heist, to confirm the protocol’s address they could return the assets. Soon after, they transferred 4,820 ether (ETH), some $8.9 million worth to Alchemix’s multisig wallet, blockchain data on Etherscan shows.

CRV, the governance token of Curve, jumped on the news and is up 5% during the day.

The transactions spur hope that most of the stolen assets could be recovered to victims in one of the most dramatic crypto exploit this year. Curve, Metronome and Alchemix lost $61.7 million of crypto assets over the weekend when an unknown hacker exploited a coding bug to loot multiple trading pools.