Lending Protocol Announces Recovery of Some Funds After $200 Million Euler Crypto Heist

The Euler Finance crypto hack was one of the largest in the past six months, drawing a lot of attention, but it seems that the attacker had a change of heart and returned all recoverable funds.

A couple of weeks ago, non-custodial DeFi lending protocol Euler Finance announced that it lost $197 million worth of digital assets to a hacker. The initial report mentioned that the attacker, or attackers, stole multiple crypto tokens, including $135.8 million worth of stETH, $8.75 million in DAI, $33.85 million in USDC and $18.5 million in WBTC.

The attackers immediately took the loot through the crypto mixer Tornado Cash, which allowed them to launder it. While this service is currently under sanctions, it’s still very much operational.

Soon after the attack, Euler offered a $1 million reward to help them track down the perpetrators.

“Today the Euler Foundation is launching a $1M reward in the hope that this provides additional incentive for information that leads to the Euler protocol attacker’s arrest and the return of all funds extracted by the attacker,” the Euler Labs posted on Twitter.

It’s not clear whether such a high bounty forced the criminals to take such a drastic change of direction. The Euler Twitter message sheds no light on this either.

“Following successful negotiations, all of the recoverable funds taken from the Euler protocol on March 13th have now been successfully returned by the exploiter,” the lending protocol Euler Finance explained.

“Because the exploiter did the right thing and returned the funds, and the $1 million reward campaign launched by the Euler Foundation will no longer be accepting new information.”

The company did promise to provide more details about its success, but it’s worth noting that the communique says that all recoverable funds have been returned, and not all stolen funds have been returned. The exact sum remains unknown, at least for now.