A new $46 million in stolen funds has just been transferred out of the Wormhole hacker’s wallet, according to on-chain statistics, which indicates that the stolen cryptocurrency from one of the biggest industry exploits is in motion once more.
Wormhole’s token bridge was exploited in February 2022, leading to the third-largest cryptocurrency breach of the year, the Wormhole attack. Wrapped ETH (wETH) worth about $321 million was taken.
PeckShield, a blockchain security company, reports that the Wormhole hacker’s connected wallet is now active once more and has moved $46 million worth of cryptocurrency.
This was made up of about 3,000 Rocket Pool Ethereum staking tokens (rETH) that were transferred to MakerDAO and 24,400 Lido Finance-wrapped Ethereum staking tokens (wstETH) valued at about $41.4 million.
The assets were exchanged for 16.6 million DAI, according to PeckShield, suggesting that the hacker was looking for income or arbitrage chances on their plunder.
The next step was to purchase 9,750 ETH valued at around $1,537 and 1,000 stETH using the MakerDAO stablecoin. Then, 9,700 wstETH were rewrapped around them.
The price of Ethereum has since dropped beneath those thresholds during the last several hours, though. According to CoinGecko, ETH was down 2.6% on the day at $1,505 at the time of writing.
At the time of the transactions, the price of stETH uncoupled from the value of Ethereum and increased to $1,570. At $1,541, they are now trading for 2.4% more than ETH. Additionally, wstETH depegged and increased to $1,676, which is 11.3% more than the underlying asset.
Only a few weeks have passed since the hacker transferred another $155 million worth of Ethereum to a decentralized exchange on January 24.
The OpenOcean DEX received 95,630 ETH, which was then turned into ETH-pegged assets like Lido’s stETH and wstETH.