Binance recovers the majority of funds stolen from Curve Finance

Crypto exchange Binance has recovered a big part of the funds from the recent hack that targeted the decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Curve Finance.

In a tweet, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao announced that the exchange has frozen and recovered $450,000 of the stolen assets, which is more than 80 percent of the stolen funds. According to Zhao, the hacker tried to send the funds to the exchange in various ways but was detected by Binance. The exchange is currently working to return the funds to their rightful owners.

The Curve Finance team detected the hack on Tuesday and alerted their users to refrain from using their website. An hour after the warning, the team announced that it was able to find and resolve the issue. However, the attackers were still able to hijack around $537,000 worth of USD Coin (USDC) before the issue was resolved.

According to experts from the blockchain analytics firm Elliptic, a hacker compromised the domain name system (DNS) of Curve Finance, which ended with malicious transactions getting signed. The experts told Cointelegraph that the funds were then sent to various exchanges and crypto mixers in an attempt to hide the trail. In the end, the funds were sent to Binance and were caught by its team.

Related: Cross-chains in the crosshairs: Hacks call for better defense mechanisms

This is not the first time this week that the good actors in the crypto community have worked to return stolen funds. On Monday, whitehat hackers and researchers returned an estimated $32.6 million worth of USDC, Tether (USDT) and other altcoins to Nomad, following the recent $190 million exploit.

The Curve Finance exploit is only one of the many attacks that happened in 2022. According to analytics firm Chainalysis, $2 billion worth of funds were drained because of cross-chain bridge hacks. This is 69% of the overall stolen amount in the year.