- Curve’s carrot-and-stick approach to recovering recently stolen funds has failed to achieve 100% success.
- The team is now offering incentives to the general public in its quest for recovery.
- The recent exploit raised questions about loans taken by Curve Founder Michael Egorov.
Curve Finance, one of the most popular decentralized finance protocols, has dominated headlines over the past week as an exploit drained several pools of over $60 million on July 30.
Following a partly unsuccessful attempt to lure exploiters to return the stolen funds with a 10% bounty, the team behind the protocol is now turning the search for the fund recovery into a free-for-all.
A $1.85 Million Bounty
On Thursday, August 3, Curve Finance offered the attackers a 10% bounty for the return of the stolen funds, promising not to pursue prosecution and setting a deadline for Sunday, August 6. While exploiters of pools associated with Alchemix and JPEGd complied with the request, Curve’s swap pool exploiter has remained obstinate, leaving it with a $18.5 million deficit.
Sponsored
With the deadline’s passing, the bounty has now been offered to the general public for information that could lead to the swap pool attacker’s conviction.
"The deadline for the voluntary return of funds in the Curve exploit passed at 0800 UTC. We now extend the bounty to the public and offer a reward valued at 10% of the remaining exploited funds (currently $1.85M USD) to the person who is able to identify the exploiter in a way that leads to a conviction in the courts," Curve wrote in an Ethereum transaction data shared on X.
While Curve maintains that it will relinquish its rights to prosecution if the hacker voluntarily returns the remaining loot, the bounty is no longer on offer.
The exploit had sent a wave of panic across the DeFi ecosystem, bringing risky loans taken by Curve founder Michael Egorov to the fore.
Contagion Fears
Egorov has over $100 million in stablecoins loans across several DeFi lending protocols backed by 427.5 million CRV tokens, representing 21.4% of the total supply.
Sponsored
With the price of CRV facing significant sell-side pressure following the exploit, Egorov’s loans came under scrutiny. Fears arose that exploiters could trigger a liquidation event by deciding to sell their holdings.
In the worst case, a protocol may be left with a bad debt if they cannot sell the CRV collateral fast enough to cover Egorov’s loan due to the token’s dwindling liquidity. Per Defi Llama data, the Curve founder’s most significant position is on AAVE V2 and risks being liquidated if CRV falls to $0.282.
At the time of writing, CRV is trading for $0.6186 per data from CoinMarketCap. On August 1, Egorov sold $46 million worth of CRV tokens to multiple liquidity providers, including Tron founder Justin Sun to help stabilize his loans.
On the Flipside
- PeckShield recently reported that over 73% of the stolen funds have been recovered.
- CRV will have to suffer a 45.6% drop to trigger a liquidation of Egorov’s loans on AAVE V2 at the time of writing.
Why This Matters
The Curve exploits raised questions about the resilience of DeFi. The recovery of the remaining loot could help restore confidence in the ecosystem and assuage fears over a potential liquidation of Egorov’s loans.
Read this to learn more about how Curve was exploited:
Unraveling the Curve Finance Hack, the Causes and Its Impact
Learn more about Coinbase’s motion to dismiss the SEC’s complaint:
Coinbase Rebukes SEC’s Overreach in Move to Dismiss Unlawful Case
