...and is definitely not an enormous grift that's pouring lighter fluid on our already smoldering planet.
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The theft was originally noticed by crypto sleuth zachxbt, who observed a suspicious transfer of around $11.5 million in crypto assets on May 8. The funds sold on decentralized exchanges and then laundered through various cryptocurrency mixing services.
BitoPro originally only told customers that the platform was offline for "maintenance", but disclosed the theft on June 2 after zachxbt published his findings.
Cork had been audited in whole or in part by four different security firms. The project's funders include Andreessen Horowitz, OrangeDAO, and Steakhouse Financial, and Cork is a part of Andreessen Horowitz's Crypto Startup Accelerator.
This led some to question how decentralized the project truly is if the funds can be frozen in such a way.
Sui validators later voted to return the frozen assets to the Cetus project. Cetus also announced that users would be fully compensated, and that they would cover the $60 million gap with project treasury funds and a loan from the Sui Foundation.
Then, on May 12, the project posted a warning that the website for the Curve frontend was "hijacked" in an apparent domain takeover.
This is not the first such compromise for Curve, which suffered a frontend compromise in August 2022 that resulted in $620,000 in losses (later recovered with the help of some exchanges).
It wasn't long, however, before people began to speculate that Yu had faked his death. Wonderland CEO Daniele Sestagalli published a letter he said he had privately received from Yu, where he confessed to faking his death and described it as his "only viable exit from persistent harassment, blackmail, and threats". Others noted that wallets belonging to Yu had been cashing out $ZEREBRO tokens priced at around $1.3 million.
Reporters from the San Francisco Standard ultimately located Yu at his parents' house, where he was "agitated and shocked that he had been found after some routine internet searches", and "declined to talk about the false report of his death or how he may have benefited financially from it."
