The Wormhole fraudster seems to be looking for arbitrage opportunities with assets that are pegged to Ethereum.
The stolen cryptocurrency from one of the biggest industry exploits is moving around once more, according to on-chain data, which shows that another $46 million in stolen money has just been transferred from a hacker’s wallet.
The Wormhole attack, which was the third-largest cryptocurrency hack of 2022, was the consequence of an exploit of Wormhole’s token bridge in February 2022. Wrapped ETH (wETH) worth about $321 million was stolen.
Read more: How $323 Million in Cryptocurrency Was Stolen from a Blockchain Bridge Called Wormhole
PeckShield, a blockchain security company, reports that the hacker’s associated wallet is now active once more and has moved $46 million worth of cryptocurrency.
This was primarily made up of roughly 24,400 wrapped Ethereum staking tokens (wstETH) from Lido Finance, valued at $41.4 million, and 3,000 from Rocket Pool Ethereum staking token (rETH), valued at $5 million, which was shifted to MakerDAO.
The assets were exchanged for 16.6 million DAI, according to PeckShield, indicating that the hacker is looking for yield or arbitrage opportunities on their stolen funds.
Using the MakerDAO stablecoin, 9,750 ETH worth about $1,537 and 1,000 stETH were purchased. After that, 9,700 wstETH were wrapped around them once more.
#PeckShieldAlert The Wormhole Network Exploiter 0x629e supplied $46M worth of cryptos, including 24.4k $wstETH ($41.4M) & 3k $rETH (~$5M), to MakerDAO for 16.6M $DAI & used them to buy 9.75k $ETH ($ETH at $1,537) & 1k $stETH ($ETH at $1,543), then wrapped them for ~9.7k $wstETH pic.twitter.com/BRfygHgpit
— PeckShieldAlert (@PeckShieldAlert) February 12, 2023
On-chain investigator noticed that the hacker was “buying the dip” on February 10.
In contrast, over the last few hours, the price of ether has decreased below those levels. According to CoinGecko, ETH was trading at $1,505 at the time of writing, down 2.6% for the day.
At the time of the transactions, the price of stETH depegged from the value of Ethereum and increased to $1,570. They were trading at $1,541 at the time of writing, 2.4% more pricey than ETH. In addition, wstETH had depegged and increased to $1,676, which was 11.3% more than the underlying asset.
Only a few weeks ago, the hacker transferred approximately $155 million worth of Ethereum to a decentralized exchange before executing the most recent transfer of funds.
95,630 ETH were transferred to the OpenOcean DEX on January 24 and afterwards converted into ETH-pegged assets, such as Lido’s stETH and wstETH.