Crypto Exchange Binance Freezes $450,000 From Curve Finance Hack

Binance CEO today reported that the crypto exchange managed to recover roughly 83% of the funds stolen from Curve Finance on Monday.

By Emily Tonelli

Binance: Image: Shutterstock

Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao took to Twitter today to announce that the crypto exchange had managed to freeze a hefty portion of stolen funds from Curve Finance. 

“Binance froze/recovered (sic) $450k of the Curve stolen funds, representing 83%+ of the hack,” tweeted Zhao. “We are working with [law enforcement] to return the funds to the users. The hacker kept on sending the funds to Binance in different ways, thinking we can't catch it.”

Curve Finance, a popular decentralized exchange, suffered a frontend attack on Monday on its nameserver curve.fi, resulting in a $570,000 loss of Ethereum (ETH) from the platform.

Binance wasn’t the only exchange to catch the Curve thieves either. On Tuesday, crypto exchange FixedFloat reported that it had also caught and froze 112 Ethereum, or roughly $211,000 at today’s prices.

 On August 11, Curve Finance reported that it had suffered a DNS attack called cache poisoning. The attack reconfigures the server to mimic the original webpage and tricks the users into entering assumed protected information. 

“What has happened strongly suggests to start moving to ENS instead of DNS,” Curve stated, implying that a move to the Ethereum Name Service could result in improved security against frontend attacks that lead to drained wallets. 

Changing to ENS would be a Web3 approach to DNS, creating a more secure namesource that is backed by two smart contracts on Ethereum.

Binance to the rescue again

This isn’t the first time Binance has stepped in to save stolen crypto. 

On April 22, Axie Infinity suffered a massive $622 million hack on its Ronin sidechain. It was later determined that the culprits were the North Korean hacker cell Lazarus Group.

Heading to Binance, the exchange caught $5.8 million spread over 86 accounts, stated Zhao on Twitter.

“We done this many times for other projects in the past too,” he added.