One day in crypto: negotiations with hackers, closed platforms, and an “attack” on Trump's project

The tanking crypto markets are not the only problem the industry had to deal with on the first day of this week – crime-related news also stole some of the attention.

On Monday, World Liberty Financial (WLFI), a decentralized finance (DeFi) project backed by US President Donald Trump’s family, said "a coordinated attack" was launched against its stablecoin USD1.

"Attackers hacked several WLFI cofounder accounts, paid influencers to spread FUD, and opened massive $WLFI shorts to profit from the manufactured chaos," the platform said, adding that "it didn't work."

Tonight, UTC time, the team clarified that no smart contracts related to its native token, WLFI, or its stablecoin had been compromised. The company claims that all USD1 funds remain secure and fully backed.

The stablecoin lost its peg yesterday, dropping from $0.99954 to $0.9942 before recovering to its usual level within around 3 hours. At the time of writing, WLFI is down 6% in a day. The token has crashed 68% from its all-time high reached six months ago.

Meanwhile, another blockchain project, IoTeX, which is developing solutions for internet-of-things devices, is offering a 10% bounty to a hacker who stole around $4.4 million in crypto assets on February 21st.

"Our forensic analysis indicates this was a sophisticated, professional operation with possible connections to prior high-profile DeFi exploits," the team behind the project said, promising to publish a detailed compensation plan for affected users at the beginning of this week.

Raullen Chai, the co-founder and CEO of IoTeX, said today that the platform has resumed all its operations, the hacker's addresses on the IoTeX chain have been frozen, and 45M IOTX was “locked and going nowhere."

At the time of writing, these tokens are worth around $200,000.

While Chai said that "recovery efforts are in full force," another exploited DeFi project didn't survive. Step Finance, which was exploited for $27 million in January, said yesterday that it will be winding down all operations, along with two other related projects, SolanaFloor and Remora Markets.

The team said it had "explored every possible path forward, including financing and acquisition opportunities" but couldn't secure "a viable outcome." Also, the team said they are working on "a buyback" for the STEP token holders, based on a snapshot prior to the incident, and a redemption process for Remora rToken holders. STEP is down 43% in a day.

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