Outside Source
US officials have seized $31 million worth of crypto linked to a 2021 hack of Uranium Finance, a now-defunct DeFi platform on BNB Chain.
News
US authorities have seized $31 million worth of crypto tied to the April 2021 hack of the now-defunct decentralized finance platform Uranium Finance.
The seizure was the result of a collaborative effort between the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York and the Homeland Security Investigations in San Diego, California, prosecutors said in a Feb. 24 X post.
Authorities didn’t provide details on who the hackers were but asked victims of the incident to contact them.
Source: US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York
Uranium Finance was a BNB Chain fork of automated market maker Uniswap, which launched its first version on April 1, 2021.
Uranium Finance’s website shuttered after the attack on April 28, 2021, while its X account hasn’t made a post since April 30, 2021 — leaving victims stranded without answers or a pathway to financial restitution until now.
One of the administrators of Uranium’s Discord channel claimed around the time of the hack that it may have been an inside job.
The hacker capitalized on bugs within the software code of Uranium’s v2 smart contracts that allowed them to inflate the project’s balance by a factor of 100 and extract funds.
Related: ‘Biggest crypto hack in history’: Bybit exploit is latest security blow to industry
This error allowed the attacker to steal $50 million from the project — which included around $36.8 million worth of BNB (BNB) and Binance USD (BUSD) at the time.
The remaining stolen funds include 80 Bitcoin (BTC), 1,800 Ether (ETH), 26,500 Polkadot (DOT), 5.7 million Tether (USDT), 638,000 Cardano (ADA) and 112,000 “U92” tokens — Uranium’s native coin before the project shuttered.
The hacker then converted the Polkadot and Cardano tokens into Ether, which were then laundered through crypto mixer Tornado Cash and transferred to centralized crypto exchanges.
Hackers also exploited Uranium’s v1 platform pool on April 8, 2021, stealing $1.3 million worth of BNB and BUSD.
This hack prompted Uranium to create a second version, which launched on April 16 before being exploited around 12 days later.
Magazine: How crypto laws are changing across the world in 2025
This article first appeared at Cointelegraph.com News
