Sturdy stablecoin market re-opens three days after $800K exploit

After recently suffering a recent exploit on its platform, decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Sturdy Finance has reopened its stablecoin market.

On June 16, the lending platform announced that it has unpaused the stablecoin market, allowing users to have access to their funds. The DeFi protocol told its users that no funds were at risk and the decision to pause the market was simply done out of “an abundance of caution.”

The stablecoin market is now unpaused, enabling users in this market to access their funds!

No funds in this market were ever at risk; the market was only paused out of an abundance of caution. As an additional safety measure, the bb-a-USD pool has been disabled pic.twitter.com/uRL0gKQSEJ

— Sturdy (@SturdyFinance) June 16, 2023

On June 12, the platform paused all markets in response to an attack that led to the loss of 442 Ether (ETH), worth around $800,000 at the time. The exploit took advantage of a faulty price oracle and used it to drain funds from the platform. 

In a community update, Sturdy Finance noted that their team is collaborating with security experts who specialize in on-chain analysis to retrieve the funds. Apart from this, the team also highlighted that they are working with global law enforcement to gather information.

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The DeFi protocol also recently offered a $100,000 bounty to the hacker that performed the exploit. According to the team, they are willing to let the matter go if the attacker returns the rest of the funds to their crypto wallet. However, the team also mentioned in the community update that if the funds are not returned, they are also offering the money to anyone who can help bring an arrest or recover the funds.

In other news, hackers are coming up with more ingenious ways to hide the funds they stole. On June 15, blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis published a report detailing how hackers are using mining pools to hide their ill-gotten gains. The hackers use this method to make an illusion that their funds were earnings from mining activities and not from ransomware attacks.

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