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In the letter
- OUSD, a stablecoin issued by Origin Protocol, was hacked in the amount of $ 7 million earlier this week.
- Now, the company is offering a $ 1 million reward (which is USD, not OUSD) to anyone who can bring hackers to justice.
- The price for OUSD, which is expected to be $ 1.00, has dropped to just 14 cents.
The Ethereum-based stablecoin OUSD was hacked earlier this week, resulting in “loss of funds of approximately $ 7 million,” according to a blog post by the coin’s issuer, Origin Protocol.
Now, the company offers a reward for anyone who can identify the attackers. “We are offering a $ 1,000,000 USD bounty to anyone who provides substantial information or evidence leading to the return of client funds,” wrote Josh Fraser, co-founder of Origin Protocol in an update to the company’s original post.
The update continues by talking directly to the hackers, suggesting that they can keep Origin’s share of money (about $ 1 million) and avoid legal action if they return the roughly $ 6 million that belongs to public investors. “Remember you are taking from those who have less,” the post reads. “If you look at the wallet addresses that contained OUSD, you will realize that many of our users are not degenerate or whale … Keep Origin funds, but don’t punish our users, many of whom were new to cryptocurrencies.”
Kay Yoo, head of operations and business strategy at Origin, processed through email. “We don’t care if the hacker returns the company funds or the personal investments of our founders,” he said Decrypt. “Our top priority right now is to recover client funds.”
According to the company, the attacker used a flash loan to start the hack and eventually laundered the stolen funds through a blending service called Tornando.cash, as well as Bitcoin wrapped (WBTC) and renBTC, which are the replacements for Bitcoin on the Ethereum blockchain.
Money laundering appears to be a fairly common use case for blending services, which mix ordinary transactions on the blockchain in such a way that they are essentially untraceable. It is a useful service if you care about privacy, but also if you are trying to do illegal things with digital money.
People who hacked Twitter last summer used a mixer called Wasabi Wallet to accomplish the same thing. A representative for Wasabi said Decrypt earlier this month that while the service can be used to commit crimes, “it is not intended for criminals to launder money”. So, kind of like uTorrent.
The price for OUSD, that is generally it should be around $ 1, fell to just $ 0.54 in the wake of the attack, and it is now only $ 0.14. Trading volume has been $ 0 since Tuesday when Origin added an update to its blog post telling users to stop buying and selling OUSD.
