In a surprising turn of events, the hacker responsible for Euler Finance’s $200 million exploit earlier this month has returned a majority of the stolen funds to the protocol. Following the return of the funds, Euler’s native EUL tokens saw a significant surge, with a 25% increase in value in the past 24 hours. The positive sentiment among traders is likely fueled by the hacker’s decision to send the tokens back to the protocol.
According to data from blockchain explorer Etherscan, over 51,000 ether, worth nearly $90 million as of Saturday, was sent back to the Euler deployer contract during the early hours in the U.S. However, the exploiter also executed several other transactions, transferring tens of millions of dai stablecoins to another wallet, as indicated by the blockchain data.
Last week, Euler Finance offered a $1 million bounty for the return of the stolen funds. At the time, the developers requested the hacker to return 90% of the stolen assets. The lending protocol had experienced an exploit earlier this month, resulting in the loss of almost $200 million in four transactions involving dai (DAI), wrapped bitcoin (wBTC), staked ether (sETH), and USD coin (USDC).
The attacker employed a flash loan to carry out the exploit, temporarily deceiving the protocol into falsely believing it held varying amounts of eToken and dToken, as reported by CoinDesk. The return of a majority of the stolen funds has brought some relief to the Euler Finance community and restored confidence among investors. It is relatively rare for hackers to return stolen funds, making this incident a noteworthy exception in the world of cryptocurrency exploits.
The impact of the exploit on the Euler Finance platform had been significant, but with the return of the stolen assets, the protocol can now focus on addressing security vulnerabilities and rebuilding trust with its users. The Euler Finance team will likely prioritize enhancing the security measures to prevent similar exploits from happening in the future.
