OUSD has been hacked earlier this week; it has resulted in a “loss of funds around $7M,” according to a blog post from the coins’ issuer, Origin Protocol.
Now the company offers a reward for anyone who could classify the attackers. “We are offering a bounty of $1,000,000 to anyone that supplies substantial information or evidence leading to the return of customer funds,” wrote the Origin Protocol co-founder Josh Fraser in an update to the company’s post.
The update speaks directly to the hackers, suggesting that they can keep Origin’s portion of the money (about $1M) and evade legal action when they return the $6M that belonged to the investors.
“Remember that you are taking from those that have less,” states the post. “If you examine the wallet addresses that held OUSD, you will realize that many of our users are not degens or whales… Keep Origin’s funds, but don’t punish our users, many of whom were new to crypto.”
The head of Business Operations and Strategy at Origin, Kay Yoo elaborated in an email, “We do not care if the hacker returns company funds or the personal investments of our founders,” she said. “Our highest priority right now is to recover customer funds.”
According to the company, the attacker has used a flash loan to launch the hack, and then laundered the stolen funds through a mixer service named Tornado.cash, and also the Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC) and renBTC, which are Bitcoin stand-ins on the Ethereum blockchain.
Money laundering appeared to be a common use case for mixing services, which mix the ordinary transactions on the blockchain in a way as to make them untraceable. It is a handy service if one wanted some privacy, and also trying to do illegal things with digital money.
The hackers of Twitter used a mixer named Wasabi Wallet to do the same thing. A representative from Wasabi said that while the service can be used to commit crimes, it is “not intended for criminals to launder money.”
The price of OUSD, which formerly sits around $1, dropped to just $.54 in the aftermath of the attack, and it is now just $.14. Trading volume had been at $0 since Tuesday when Origin appended an update to its blog post by telling the users to stop buying and selling OUSD.
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