Wintermute’s $96M Debt Pay-Off Despite Hack

US-based crypto market-maker firm Wintermute has managed to fulfill its debt obligations by repaying $96 million USDT on DeFi lending platform TrueFi.

According to the TrueFi dashboard, the uncollateralized loan was repaid on October 14, one day before its due date. One of the largest loans made on TrueFi’s platform, Wintermute’s initial loan from the DeFi lender was made in April.

Speaking on the same, CEO Evgeny Gaevoy said the move reflects Wintermute’s healthy liquidity position which he claims is still “going strong”.

For the record, the top crypto trading platform offers liquidity on more than 50 exchanges and trading platforms, including decentralized mainstays Dydx and Uniswap as well as Binance, Coinbase, FTX, and Kraken.

It also invests actively, having supported businesses including Nomad, HashFlow, and Ondo Finance.

Moreover, a $160 million hack on September 20 did not hinder Wintermute’s capacity to pay its bills, TronWeekly reported the other day.

As the platform processes thousands of market-making transactions every day, the hack occurred as a result of an access vulnerability related to a “vanity address” on an account Wintermute utilized to save gas expenses.

Bug That Targeted Wintermute Is Still On The Loose

Wintermute’s founder Gaevoy, said in a series of tweets that the company’s decentralized finance operations had been compromised, but that over-the-counter and centralized financial verticals were unaffected.

On-chain security experts pointed out a bug in a wallet tool called Profanity as the main culprit.

One of the most widely used methods for creating wallet addresses in the past, the project was abandoned because of serious security issues.

The same bug also recently affected the decentralized exchange aggregator ParaSwap whose deployer address fell prey to the Profanity vulnerability.

But thanks to the knowledge of the bug, Blockchain security infrastructure firm BlockSec has been able to help ParaSwap in recovering the lost funds.

Although Profanity is well known for being a useful tool for creating addresses, the creator of Profanity warned on Github that wallet security is extremely crucial, “The code will not receive any updates, and I’ve left it in an uncompilable state,” the developer wrote. “Use something else!”

Lipika Deka: Lipika is a crypto-journalist at TWJ. A graduate in economics and finance, she has a keen interest in the political and socio-economic facets of blockchain technology and the cryptocurrency industry.