JPEG’d, the Nonfungible token finance (NFT-Fi) protocol, has officially verified the return of 5,495 Ether (ETH), which amounts to approximately $10 million at the current price of $1,829 per ETH. These funds were retrieved from the Curve Finance hacker.
As a reward for returning the stolen funds on July 30, the hacker received a bounty of 610.6 ETH, equivalent to $1.1 million.
JPEG’d, a decentralized lending protocol facilitating borrowing against collateralized NFTs, suffered a significant loss of $11.6 million worth of crypto during the major hack on Curve Finance.
However, in an Aug. 4 Twitter thread, the JPEG’d team confirmed the successful return of the funds to the decentralized autonomous organization’s multisig wallet address. They also clarified that any ongoing investigations or legal actions against the involved entity would be terminated. The team regarded this incident as a white-hat rescue, implying that the return of the funds was carried out with good intentions and in the best interest of the protocol.
Late in July, the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem experienced a significant setback when several liquidity pools on Curve Finance were drained due to a security vulnerability in the Vyper smart contract programming language used by these pools. The total losses amounted to approximately $70 million worth of cryptocurrency.
The exploit impacted various projects, including Ellipsis, Alchemix, JPEG’d, and Metronome, resulting in millions of dollars’ worth of assets being stolen from liquidity pools. Additionally, Curve Finance lost around $22 million worth of Curve DAO (CRV) tokens.
On August 3, a joint initiative by Curve, Metronome, and Alchemix was announced, offering the hacker a 10% bounty and assurance of no legal action if they returned the remaining 90% of the stolen funds.
Surprisingly, within a short period of less than 24 hours, the hacker agreed to the deal and commenced the gradual return of the stolen funds to the respective projects.
As part of the process, the hacker has returned 4,820.55 Alchemix ETH (alETH), valued at approximately $8.8 million, to the Alchemix Finance team, and 1 ETH ($1,829) to the Curve Finance team.