The person responsible for hacking and stealing funds from Euler Finance, a decentralized lending project, has returned the remaining $31 million, effectively ending the project’s recovery efforts.
On Monday, at around 6:55 pm EST, the hacker sent back $31 million, which included 10,580 ETH ($19 million) and $12 million in DAI, through three transactions.
This means that over $177 million has been returned to Euler Finance, which represents 90% of the expected recoverable funds from the hack after factoring in the 10% bounty previously offered by the project. The team at Euler Finance has confirmed this information.
In a recent tweet, Euler Labs, the developer of the affected project, announced that they had successfully recovered all the funds taken from the Euler protocol on March 13th by the exploiter. They stated that after successful negotiations, the exploiter returned the recoverable funds.
This positive news is a rarity in the DeFi space, where big hacks have been happening more frequently. On March 13, Euler Finance experienced a sophisticated attack that utilized flash loans, resulting in the loss of $197 million worth of cryptocurrency assets.
In an effort to recover the stolen funds, Euler Finance offered the hacker a 10% reward worth $19.7 million while warning that a $1 million reward for information on the attacker would be initiated if the remaining 90% of the funds were not returned.
Initially, many had doubts about the recovery process for Euler Finance after the hacker laundered $1.8 million through the crypto mixer Tornado Cash three days after the attack. However, the recovery process began on March 18th, with the return of $5.4 million to Euler.
Over the following days, the hacker returned funds at various intervals. The hacker returned the most significant tranche of $102 million in ETH.
On March 28th, the hacker sent several on-chain messages to their address, using the input data to share messages with the public. In these messages, the hacker expressed their apologies and promised to return the remaining funds as soon as possible.