Authorities in France Arrest Duo Involved in Platypus Exploit

Authorities in France Arrest Duo Involved in Platypus Exploit
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Two people alleged of being behind an attack on the decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Platypus have been arrested, according to a tweet by France's police department.

Of the $9 million in stolen assets, Platypus said it has recovered 2.4 million USDC and 687,000 BUSD, it has also worked with Tether to freeze 1.5 million USDT. French law enforcement seized approximately $220,000 of cryptography in connection with the arrest. USDC, USDT and BUSD are all stablecoins that are designed to reflect the price of fiat currencies like the U.S. dollar.

USP, a Platypus USD-backed stablecoin, is currently trading at $0.32 according to CoinGecko.

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Platypus is a stablecoin-centric automated market maker (AMM) on the Avalanche blockchain. According to DeFiLlama, Platypus has $39.2 million in total value locked (TVL). The protocol's LTV is markedly lower than its peak of $1.2 billion in March 2022.

In a tweet, the protocol’s team thanked BINANCE and ZachXBT for their assistance in tracing the identity of the attacker.

The type of attack used against Platypus involved a and is similar to the structure of attack used against Mango Markets late last year. Flash lending is not necessarily a bad thing, it was first developed as a tool for traders seeking arbitrage opportunities.

This particular attack used a logic error within USP’s smart contracts, which continually checks for solvency. As stated earlier, the attacker used aave borrowed cryptography to provide cash to a platypus trading pool. Smart contracts then issued a liquidity vendor token, lp-usdc, and placed it in a protocol staking contract. They then borrowed usp stablecoins against their positions lp and any withdrawn aave to reimburse the flash loan.

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On February 24, Platypus announced it intends to replay a minimum of 63% of funds to users after it managed to recover a part of the $9 million drained from the protocol last week.

The French police do not name the suspects and do not announce the accusations.

A D V E R T I S E M E N T
A D V E R T I S E M E N T
$23,423
0.90%
$1,640.11
2.26%
BNB$305.09
0.47%
XRP$0.37286968
1.39%
$12.44
0.71%
View All Prices
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