Daily Archives: September 20, 2022

Crypto market maker Wintermute loses $160 million in DeFi hack

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Evgeny Gaevoy, the founder and chief executive of Wintermute, disclosed in a series of tweets that the firm’s decentralized finance operations had been hacked, but centralized finance and over the counter verticals aren’t affected.

He said that Wintermute — which counts Lightspeed Venture Partners, Pantera Capital and Fidelity’s Avon among its backers — remains solvent with “twice over that amount in equity left.” He assured lenders that if they wish to recall their loans, Wintermute will honor that.

“If you have a MM agreement with Wintermute, your funds are safe. There will be a disruption in our services today and potentially for next few days and will get back to normal after,” he wrote.

“Out of 90 assets that has been hacked only two have been for notional over $1 million (and none more than $2.5M), so there shouldn’t be a major selloff of any sort. We will communicate with both affected teams asap.”

Wintermute provides liquidity on over 50 exchanges and trading platforms including Binance, Coinbase, FTX, Kraken as well as decentralized platforms Dydx and Uniswap. It’s also an active investor, having backed startups including Nomad, HashFlow and Ondo Finance.

Gaevoy or Wintermute did not disclose when the hack took place or the how the attackers were able to succeed, and whether it has alerted the law enforcement. TechCrunch has reached out to Wintermute for more details.

Wintermute is the latest in a growing list of crypto firms to have suffered a hack in recent months. Hackers stole over $190 million from cross-chain messaging protocol Nomad just last month. Axis Infinity’s Ronin Bridge lost over $600 million in a hack this April, and Harmony’s Horizon bridge was drained of $100 million in June. More than $1.3 billion were lost in DeFi hack last year, according to crypto auditing platform Certik.

Source: Crypto market maker Wintermute loses $160 million in DeFi hack | TechCrunch

economic and fiscal effects on the United States from reduced numbers of refugees and asylum seekers – around $11.1 billion per year

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International migrants who seek protection also participate in the economy. Thus the policy of the United States to drastically reduce refugee and asylum-seeker arrivals from 2017 to 2020 might have substantial and ongoing economic consequences. This paper places conservative bounds on those effects by critically reviewing the research literature. It goes beyond prior estimates by including ripple effects beyond the wages earned or taxes paid directly by migrants. The sharp reduction in US refugee admissions starting in 2017 costs the overall US economy today over $9.1 billion per year ($30,962 per missing refugee per year, on average) and costs public coffers at all levels of government over $2.0 billion per year ($6,844 per missing refugee per year, on average) net of public expenses. Large reductions in the presence of asylum seekers during the same period likewise carry ongoing costs in the billions of dollars per year. These estimates imply that barriers to migrants seeking protection, beyond humanitarian policy concerns, carry substantial economic costs.

Source: economic and fiscal effects on the United States from reduced numbers of refugees and asylum seekers | Oxford Review of Economic Policy | Oxford Academic