U.S. authorities recovered $31 million in cryptocurrency stolen in 2021 cyberattacks on Uranium Finance, a Binance Sensible Chain-based DeFi protocol.
Uranium Finance was a decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol constructed on Binance’s BNB Chain that operated as an automatic market maker (AMM) just like Uniswap.
The platform launched in April 2021, however hackers shortly exploited vulnerabilities in its sensible contracts to empty its belongings and push it to untimely dying, inflicting thousands and thousands in investor losses.
Blockchain intelligence agency TRM Labs reported right now that it has aided the Southern District of New York (SDNY) and Homeland Safety Investigations (HSI) San Diego in monitoring and recovering the stolen belongings, leading to one of the vital retrievals in recent times.
“In February 2023, TRM labored carefully with legislation enforcement to meticulously hint the motion of stolen belongings throughout a number of blockchains, figuring out key laundering patterns and producing actionable intelligence for legislation enforcement,” reads the TRM Labs report.
“By March 2023, the staff had mapped out the attackers’ makes an attempt to obfuscate their funds, linking them to Twister Money transactions and cross-chain swaps.”
“Because of this, legislation enforcement was in a position to efficiently seize USD 31 million in excellent funds in February 2025.”
Supply: TRM Labs
The funds had been stolen in two assaults, each in April 2021, leading to losses of over $53,700,000.
The primary assault, from April 6, 2021, exploited a vulnerability within the reward distribution system, resulting in a $1.4 million theft.
The hacker later returned $1 million, retaining $385,500, which was laundered by way of Twister Money.
The second assault happened on April 28, 2021, and leveraged a single-character coding error in Uranium Finance’s buying and selling logic, permitting attackers to steal $52 million by manipulating balances.
The stolen funds had been laundered by decentralized exchanges, transformed into varied cryptocurrencies, and saved in dormant wallets for years.
With over half of this quantity now recovered, the U.S. SDNY requested victims of the hack to e mail UraniumVictims@hsi.dhs.gov to say a portion of the recovered cryptocurrency.
