Euler (EUL) Up 25% As Hacker Returns 51,000 ETH From Stolen Loot

EUL, the native token of the DeFi lending protocol Euler Finance, is currently experiencing an impressive price rally driven mainly by news of the protocol recovering some of the stolen funds from the $200 million hack that occurred earlier this month. 

EUL Gains 25% In 24 Hours

According to data from Coingecko, EUL is up 25% in the last 24 hours since the release of the news, indicating growing positive sentiment among its investors. Euler Finance is an Ethereum-based DeFi protocol that allows users to borrow and lend almost any cryptocurrency.

On March 13, Euler Finance suffered an attack resulting in the loss of crypto assets worth $200 million. By exploiting the flash loan mechanism on the platform, the hacker was able to move huge amounts of funds off Euler in the form of dai (DAI), wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC), staked ether (sETH) and USD Coin (USDC). 

Looking at EUL’s broader performance, the token has gained 16.8% in the last seven days. However, its current market price represents a 53.7% decline from a month ago.

At the time of writing, EUL is trading at $3.60 with a daily volume of $5.42 million and a market cap of $59.03 million. Meanwhile, Euler Finance is reported to have a TVL of $9.7 million based on data on Defillama.

Hacker Returns $90 Million From Exploit 

In the days following the heist, Euler Finance began efforts to recover the stolen assets, first by offering the hacker a deal to retain 10% of the loot and return the remaining, albeit the proposition was ignored. Thereafter, they offered a $1 million reward for information that could lead to the arrest of the hacker.

However, in an interesting turn of events, the hacker suddenly returned a huge chunk of the funds to Euler’s Finance yesterday. Prior to this development, the hacker had previously returned 3,000 ETH, currently valued at $5.3 million, on March 18. 

According to data from Etherscan, Euler’s hacker sent over 51,000 ETH, worth over $90 million, to the protocol’s deployer address in the afternoon of yesterday, March 25. 

So far, there is no official statement by Euler explaining this development. But as expected, the partial recovery of the loot has bumped up investors’ confidence in the protocol, contributing to the current price rally of Euler’s native token EUL. 

Following the news of this development, EUL’s price rose 60.4% to reach $4.38. However, the token soon experienced a slight recorrection, finding support around the price region of $3.38 before resuming its bullish trajectory.

That said, hacks and exploits still remain one of the biggest issues facing the crypto space. According to a report by The Fintech Times, a total of $8.9 billion has been lost to crypto security attacks since 2011.