Curve Protocol’s TVL Plunge & The White-Hat Twist of the JPEG’d Hacker Saga

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On August 5th, data analytics firm IntoTheBlock reported an unexpected decrease in Curve Protocol’s Total Value Locked (TVL). It had experienced losses of $3.1 billion due to a hack that caused an liquidity exodus. Larger pools like stETH/ETH merely declined 20%, but sETH/ETH meeting greater losses from the hack with a devastating 50% reduction. The entire DeFi ecosystem was thrown into disarray as the estimates from the hack total $70 million across various projects including Ellipses, Alchemix, JPEG’d, and Metronome. Most of the damage caused was due to the Vyper smart contract vulnerability.

In an effort to make a resolution to the issue, the vulnerable parties coordinated a reward of 1.1 million ETH (worth ~$1.1 million). The Hacker was responsive to this strategy as it gave them 610.6 ETH back which returns a total of 5,495 ETH ($10 million) to Curve Finance. After a statement released on August 4th, the funds were returned to the DAO multisig wallet. this was viewed as more of a ‘white-hat’ incident as any investigations or legal actions against the hacker were excluded.

Though the DeFi space has seen tremendous development in the past few years, emergency like these are still noticable across the DeFi space. It necessitates that better safeguards and security audizations practiced throughout the space

Robert Wilson author
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