The Celsius cryptocurrency lending company has reportedly lost more than $ 50 million in the exploitation of the decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol BadgerDAO.
According to on-chain statistics from Etherscan, the hack targeted the network’s protocol, netting an unconfirmed $120 million in assets.
The Hack’s Biggest Victim
According to one Redditor, this address is reportedly the greatest victim of the breach. The address lost 896 Wrapped Bitcoin ($51 million). According to initial reports, the 896 bitcoins come from a wallet linked to Celsius. The address is thought to belong to Celsius, since it has interacted with other addresses known to be owned by them.
The address also regularly transacts with another address having a $67 million balance. $40 million of the balance is in Celsius’ native coin CEL.
“All this means that there’s a high chance that the address that lost 900 BTC was owned by Celsius. Celsius has not confirmed anything yet, so this is all speculation for now, so we don’t know for sure if Celsius was affected or not,” the user suggested.
Efforts to reach Celsius CEO Alex Mashinsky for comment on Thursday evening were not futile. He stated that the company would issue a statement on Friday, but did not elaborate.
Celsius responded to the attack with a series of Tweets on Friday. The business note that:
According to a recent tweet, BadgerDAO has recruited data forensic experts Chainalysis to also investigate the attack. The company said that it is moving forward with internal and external investigations.
BadgerDAO Suffered from an Exploit
Early December saw the first complaints of BadgerDAO’s security issue. The protocol publicly declared on Wednesday that it has received multiple exporters of illicit withdrawals of user cash. The Badger team continued to investigate the problem and paused all smart contracts on the protocol to minimize any future losses.
Late November saw a significant reduction in the value of the Celsius coin. CEL fell to $3.9 the next day after reaching $4.5 on Nov. 25. It has however subsequently recovered marginally. CEL is currently trading at $4.00, down approximately 9% over the last seven days. However, this is up around 1% over the last 14 days.
Celsius Network is a well-known crypto lending platform that allows users to earn interest on digital assets such as Bitcoin.
The company raised $400 million in Series B investment round from October to $750 million in late November. Hence, the firm has risen to become one of the biggest players in DeFi, with a valuation of $3.5 billion.