By
Benjamin Njiri
April 23rd, 2024
Wintermute’s latest repayment of $92.5 million worth of TrueFi loan has led to the suspicion that it was paid from the $160 million hacked from the platform.
Crypto market maker Wintermute has cleared off one of its largest debt loans issued by TrueFi. As per reports, Wintermute paid $92 million worth of loans in Tether’s USDT stablecoin.
With this payment, Wintermute has cleared nearly 50% of its outstanding $189 million worth of debt. The crypto market maker still owes $75 million to Maple Finance in USD Coin and wrapped ether (WETH) in addition to $22.4 million to Clearpool. Thus, it still has $97.4 million in unpaid debt.
As per the TrueFi loan details, Wintermute had borrowed $92.5 million for a period of 180 days. Interestingly, the payment comes despite Wintermute facing a $160 million loss in a recent hack. As per the details, more than 90 crypto assets were stolen from the platform.
As per transaction data, Wintermute repaid the loan with interest last Friday, a day before the deadline. Also, the loan was uncollateralized. It means that the borrower didn’t pledge any assets against the loan. Wintermute’s financial standing and reputation alone contributed to the loan security.
Suspicion Over Loan Repayment
James Edwards from Libre Blockchain has shared his suspicion over the TrueFi loan repayment by Wintermute. Edwards claims that “some of the funds from their recent “hack” contributed to the payback”.
He further called out BlockSec for attempting to debunk a conspiracy theory about an internal job. He added that BlockSec was earlier “dead wrong” in calling out another firm for using the “Vanity address” tool. Edwards further noted:
“To believe that a market maker handling billions of dollars (their words) worth of crypto assets per day would use such a tool to create an address ultimately responsible for managing hundreds of millions of dollars in value is preposterous”.
While supporting his claim, Edwards pointed out the GitHub URL to the tool used by Wintermute to generate their vanity address.
There have been multiple reports of hacks and defaults, especially in the DeFi space this year in 2022. Last week, TrueFi issued a default notice to Blockwater Technologies for missing a scheduled payment related to a $3.4 million loan in Binance USD (BUSD).
Last week, Solana-based DeFi platform Mango Market suffered a $117 million hack. The team at Mango Markets negotiated with the hacker to keep $47million as a bug bounty and repay the rest of $67 million.