The anonymous hacker that attacked decentralized finance (DeFi) company, Crema has successfully agreed to return a heavy majority of the stolen funds in exchange for a whopping $1.68 million white hat bounty. Crema announced that it had suffered a security breach on its platform on 3rd July 2022.

The orchestrator of the breach had stolen over $8.7 million worth of assets including 6.5 million USDC tokens and 69,422 SOL coins. In the course of investigations, it was discovered that the hacker had exploited a hidden vulnerability in the protocol’s accounts.

On 3rd July 2022, Crema sent a message to the hacker, offering them $800,000 as a white hat bounty in exchange for the return of the stolen funds.

The message read “Your addresses on both Solana and Ethereum, have been blacklisted and all eyes are on you right now. You have 72h from now to consider becoming a white hat and keeping $800k as the bounty and transferring the remaining funds back to our contract-update-authority address.

Otherwise, the police and legal force will get involved officially and there will be endless tracing waiting for you”. The company tweeted on Wednesday that it had begun negotiating with the hacker and ended up reaching an agreement that saw the hacker keep 45,455 SOL in exchange for the return of 6,064 ETH and 23,967.9 SOL which amounted to $8.3 million at Thursday’s trading price.

Crema is not the first DeFi platform to suffer a breach that led to the loss of heavy amounts of digital assets. In April, Deus Finance was hacked and the attackers made away with a little over $13 million in cryptocurrency assets.

Still, in April, decentralized stablecoin Beanstalk was attacked flash loan style and lost more than $180 million of assets. In June, Inverse finance suffered its second attack this year alone losing over $1.26 million to attackers.

Solana-based Port finance wasn’t hacked but the platform had to pay a $630,000 white hat bounty to a hacker to prevent the exploitation of a bug that could have cost the company $25 million.

According to Chainalysis, 97% of the crypto assets stolen in the first three months of this year were stolen from DeFi protocols. This is a 72% rise from previous years and does not encourage prospective and present customers who have a real reason to be worried about the security of their assets.

Featured image source: Medium