Binance invests $5M in Curve token as hacker partially returns funds

Binance Labs, the enterprise arm of cryptocurrency trade Binance, has invested $5 million in Curve (CRV), the namesake token of the decentralized stablecoin buying and selling platform.

“Curve is the most important stableswap and second-largest DEX [decentralized exchange], with roughly $2.4B in whole worth locked and $215M in each day quantity on the time of writing,” Binance Labs said in the Aug. 10 announcement. Yi He, Binance’s co-founder and head of Binance Labs, stated the agency is pledging its full help to the DEX “given current occasions which have impacted the protocol.” 

The agency says in trade for the funding, Curve will deploy to BNB Sensible Chain. The protocol at present operates on a number of chains, having been initially primarily based on Ethereum, and serves as considered one of decentralized finance’s (DeFi’s) greatest market makers with a number of hundred swimming pools in use.

On July 30, Curve was drained of $73.5 million from its secure swimming pools attributable to a reentrancy vulnerability in its underlying programming language, Vyper. On Aug. 4, the hacker behind the exploit wrote by way of Ethereum: “I’m refunding you not as a result of you will discover me, it’s as a result of I don’t need to smash your venture. I’m smarter than all of you, fuck!!”

Quickly after the message, 73%, or round $52.3 million, of the stolen property have been returned to Curve by the hacker. For the reason that full quantity was not returned, Curve subsequently issued a $1.85 million bounty for data pertaining to the whereabouts and identification of the hacker. The return of funds, though partial, prevented the liquidation of $100 million in loans on varied DeFi protocols originating from Curve founder Michael Egorov, of which CRV was used as the underlying collateral. 

#PeckShieldAlert A complete of ~$73.5M price of cryptos on #Ethereum have been stolen in the #Curve Reentrancy exploit. Up to now, ~73% of them (~$52.3M) have been returned.

The remaining ~$19.7M price of cryptos on #Ethereum haven’t but been returned by the first Curve CRV-ETH exploiter… pic.twitter.com/hU4v1UATeh

— PeckShieldAlert (@PeckShieldAlert) August 7, 2023

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