Two DeFi projects were hacked for $30M as crypto prices fell

As if the continuously dropping cryptoasset market is not enough, two decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols were exploited to the tune of more than $30 million. On the "bright" side, the criminals are being hit by falling prices as well.

The first and biggest victim was Solana (SOL) blockchain-based portfolio management platform Step Finance. On Saturday, they confirmed that several treasury wallets were compromised by "a sophisticated actor." While the team hasn't specified losses, blockchain security analysts at CertiK claim that the criminals stole 261,854 SOL, which was worth around $29 million at the time, and is worth $26 million at the time of writing, as prices recovered some of their losses over the weekend.

Step Finance hasn't elaborated on the attack, only saying that it was "facilitated through a well-known attack vector" and "immediate remediation steps have been taken," while the team has also notified authorities and asked cybersecurity firms for help.

No other actionable updates have been shared since then, while the STEP token, the native token of the platform, is still down 92% in a week, despite jumping by 25% in the past day.

Meanwhile, late Sunday (UTC time), DeFi protocol CrossCurve reported an ongoing attack on their so-called bridge, which helps different blockchains communicate and transfer tokens between them. The team said that criminals exploited "a vulnerability in one of the smart contracts used." The estimated losses are worth around $3 million.

CrossCurve is now trying to reach the criminals, claiming that the "tokens were wrongfully taken from users due to a smart contract exploit" and that they "do not believe this was intentional on your part, and there is no indication of malicious intent."

The team has offered a 10% bounty, giving 72 hours to return the funds. If the criminals fail to return the funds, the DeFi protocol, besides pursuing traditional legal action, promises to publicly disclose "wallet addresses, transaction traces, associated addresses, and any attribution findings."

While both exploits were ongoing, the whole cryptoasset market was going down. As prices are trying to recover on Monday morning, multiple tokens from the top 100 are down more than 20% in a week. At the time of writing, bitcoin (BTC) is trading above $76,400, or 13% lower than a week ago, while Ethereum (ETH) crashed 23% to $2,227.

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