Swapping More Than $157M of ETH for stETH and Levering Up, the Wormhole Network Exploiter Is a DeFi Degen
The address that hacked one of the most popular cross-blockchain bridges Wormhole started moving capital in the DeFi ecosystem.
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The expoliter’s Lido shenanigans were so massive that they had a material effect on the market for the popular liquid staking derivative. Its 24-hour trading volume is up over 3000%, per CoinGecko. During the chaos of the day, stETH’s price increased relative to ETH, jumping above its 1:1 peg temporarily, before settling at 0.9985, per Dune Analytics.
The sudden activity by the exploiter prompted its victims to respond. In one transaction, an address belonging to Wormhole sent an on-chain message asking the exploiter to return the stolen funds in exchange for a $10 million bounty.
The Wormhole Network exploiter did not return a request comment to CoinDesk via Blockscan.
Here is the walk-through for the exploiter’s shuffle of funds
First, the Wormhole Network exploiter triggered a transaction on OpenOcean that swapped 96,630 ETH for 96,677 stETH, Lido’s derivative token that stands for the total value of a user’s initial staked ETH and its accrued interest.
Second, the Wormhole Network exploiter decided in another transaction to wrap 86,473 stETH.
Third, the exploiter deployed 25,000 wrapped stETH as collateral to borrow $13 million DAI.
Fourth, the exploiter used the $13 million DAI it just borrowed to accumulate almost 8,000 stETH on Kyber Network, an Ethereum-based decentralized exchange.
Fifth, the exploiter executed a transaction to wrap the roughly 8,000 stETH it received moments ago.
Sixth, the exploiter received $1.5 million DAI.
Seventh, the exploiter swapped out the $1.5 million DAI for some 923 stETH through DEX Aggregator 1Inch.
The exploiter has since continued receiving thousands of wrapped staked ether (wstETH) tokens.
