A $5 million reward has been announced by the decentralized lending network UwU Lend to “identify and locate” the exploiter.
The creators of UwU Lend are offering up to $5 million “to the first person to identify and locate” a hacker who took advantage of the protocol to obtain cryptocurrency valued at over $23 million.
The UwU Lend team, who anticipated receiving 80% of the stolen funds back in exchange for a 20% reward, established a deadline that the attacker missed, and soon after that, the bounty was made public.
The hacker began channeling the stolen assets through Tornado Cash, a mixing service approved by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) of the U.S. Department of Treasury for facilitating about $7 billion in cryptocurrency laundering since 2019, as crypto investigator @CryptoEvgen reported in their X account.Â
It is believed that the hacker has already laundered at least 500 ETH as of publication, equivalent to about $1.7 million at the current market value. The same hacker targeted UwU Lend, which uses the open-source AAVE v2 code, twice in less than three days, conducting what looked like flash loan assaults that compromised several liquidity pools.
Established by Michael Patryn, alias “0xSifu” or Omar Dhanani, a co-founder of the now-defunct QuadrigaCX exchange, UwU Lend offers lending, borrowing, and staking services. The platform’s native token, UwU, is used to distribute platform income.