Wintermute Trading

Basics

NEAR got publicly outed by Wintermute for not paying back their USN hole that Wintermute covered after Alameda went down (8-11-2023). Interestingly enough multiple NEAR partnership announcements were released around the same days, potentially doing damage control.

Bugs/Exploits

• From Rekt (20-9-2022):

"Their hot wallet has been compromised, likely through the use of a vanity address, created with the vulnerable tool Profanity. The loss was announced by Wintermute CEO Evgeny Gaevoy approximately three hours after the theft:

"We’ve been hacked for about $160M in our defi operations. Cefi and OTC operations are not affected We are solvent with twice over that amount in equity left"

The firm’s CEO states that the use of the vanity address was for “gas savings” rather than aesthetics… an expensive choice."

• The OP core team and Wintermute had a 20m OP exploit when using old (9-6-2022) Gnosis Safe code while having multichain deployments. 17m got returned and 1m got sent to Vitalik (10-6-2022) 2m was kept by the hacker 'as a bounty':

"Optimism hired crypto market maker Wintermute to distribute the tokens in a highly anticipated airdrop. But because Optimism sent them to a Wintermute layer-1 address that hadn't yet been synced to layer-2, they were all inaccessible. Wintermute said that the tokens would be secure. But within a day, a hacker stole all 20 million tokens. They were worth $35 million at the time. The address has returned a majority of the OP, and @wintermute_t has committed to reimbursing the Optimism Foundation for the remaining 2mm OP, which was kept as a bounty."

Projects

KYC Subnet

• From a commissioned Messari report (15-7-2022):

"The single most salient development here came with Ava Labs’ announcement that it will collaborate with Aave, GoldenTree Asset Management, Wintermute, Jump Crypto, Valkyrie, and Securitize to build a permissioned subnet with native KYC functionality.

TRON DAO

• It is one of the whitelisted institutions of the TRON DAO Reserve (TDR), which governs the overcollateralization of USDD (4-11-2022).

Investments

• According to this thread (16-2-2023):

"Total Balance $401m • $301m $wETH • $47m $OP • $22.2m $LDO • $17m $ETH • $7.5m $GALA (most acquired this month) • $7.3m $FTM • $6.6m $DYDX • $6m $BLUR • $5.7m $HFT • $5.1m $MATIC. Wintermute deposited $5m+ of $BLUR to several exchange deposit addresses right around the airdrop (potentially dumping). Finally, Wintermute has seemingly been selling ~$4m of $APE in February."

• Got put in the B category on a Crypto VC list (29-8-2022).
• Angle; took part in the $5M raise (28-9-2021).
• Hashflow; was part of their Series A round (7-2022).
• Pyth; Wintermute Ventures participated in its first announced round (5-12-2023).
• Taiko: Wintermute Ventures was part of the $15M pre-mainnet Series A (2-3-2024).
• UMA. Took part in the Range Token raise for UMA of $2.66M (16-7-2021).