Binance invests $5M in Curve token as hacker partially returns funds

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Binance Labs, the venture arm of cryptocurrency exchange Binance, has invested $5 million in Curve (CRV), the namesake token of the decentralized stablecoin trading platform.

“Curve is the largest stableswap and second-largest DEX [decentralized exchange], with approximately $2.4B in total value locked and $215M in daily volume at the time of writing,” Binance Labs said in the Aug. 10 announcement. Yi He, Binance’s co-founder and head of Binance Labs, said the firm is pledging its full support to the DEX “given recent events that have impacted the protocol.”

The firm says in exchange for the investment, Curve will deploy to BNB Smart Chain. The protocol currently operates on multiple chains, having been originally based on Ethereum, and serves as one of decentralized finance’s (DeFi’s) biggest market makers with several hundred pools in use.

On July 30, Curve was drained of $73.5 million from its stable pools due to a reentrancy vulnerability in its underlying programming language, Vyper. On Aug. 4, the hacker behind the exploit wrote via Ethereum: “I’m refunding you not because you can find me, it’s because I don’t want to ruin your project. I’m smarter than all of you, fuck!!”

Soon after the message, 73%, or around $52.3 million, of the stolen assets were returned to Curve by the hacker. Since the full amount was not returned, Curve subsequently issued a $1.85 million bounty for information pertaining to the whereabouts and identity of the hacker. The return of funds, although partial, prevented the liquidation of $100 million in loans on various DeFi protocols originating from Curve founder Michael Egorov, of which CRV was used as the underlying collateral.

#PeckShieldAlert A total of ~$73.5M worth of cryptos on #Ethereum were stolen in the #Curve Reentrancy exploit. So far, ~73% of them (~$52.3M) have been returned.

The remaining ~$19.7M worth of cryptos on #Ethereum have not yet been returned by the 1st Curve CRV-ETH exploiter… pic.twitter.com/hU4v1UATeh

— PeckShieldAlert (@PeckShieldAlert) August 7, 2023