In a surprising twist of events, less than $19.3 million has been returned to the U.S. government's treasury by a hacker who on October 24 carried out the heist of probably $20 million. That money had been taken out of the proceeds from the infamous Bitfinex 2016 hack. Analysis provided by Arkham Intelligence according to the transactions from the blockchain revealed that nearly 88% of the funds were pushed back to the treasury causing the hack amount to melt down consequently this treasury address starting with “0xc9E” appear to be used to handle the unwinding. A total sum of around 5.7 billion bits, represented by 2.412 Ether(ETH) at $2,492 per coin, 7,200 USDC and 13.2 million of USDC staked with Aave (aUSDC), was sent back. Analysing the blockchain movements, the investigator recalled that the returned amount did not include the last $700,000 which the hacker had transferred to instant exchanges which meant that some portion of the funds was not recoverable. The motivation behind the hack and who the hacker is were not revealed to mention but this case does underscore the increasing trend of cryptocurrency hacks. The security firm CertiK noted that there was a rise of 9.5% in theft in the cryptocurrency industry in the Q3 2024 quarter, the data showed a loss of more than $750 million from major cyber attacks.

October Hacks Craze

The move to return the Bitfinex hackers funds comes at a time when there have been a number of high dollar exploits in the month of October, highight a growing trove in decentralized finance (DeFi). On October 16, Radiant Capital, a cross-chain lending protocol, was attacked by a hacker who drained 50 million dollars in the process by exploiting the protocols of the BNB Smart Chain and Arbitrum networks. The attacker compromised the Radiant Capital multisignature wallet and funneled the stolen assets to the Ethereum network making the recovery very hard. Subsequent to that, a front-end hack was conducted onto the website of the decentralized trading platform Ambient Finance. The attacker only accessed the website and this way, retrieved informatio