Decentralized Finance (DeFi) protocol called Crema Finance was hacked on July 2nd, 2022. After the hack, the team of the project disclosed that they had negotiated with the hacker, who had decided to return crypto assets worth $8 million. The team disclosed that the hacker had agreed to take 45,455 Solana (SOL) tokens as a white hat bounty.

Exploit’s investigation

Crema Finance had suffered from exploitation at the start of the month and it saw the protocol lose crypto assets valued at $8.7 million. Reports had disclosed that digital currencies worth $8,782,446, had been siphoned off in flash loan attacks on the DeFi protocol. The project was suspended temporarily and the company launched an investigation into the hack.

An update on July 5th from Crema Finance disclosed that they were making ‘significant progress’. On Tuesday, Crema Finance said that they had been able to find a suspicious identity by tracking the gas sources of the wallet address used by the hacker. They said that the new would give further updates after verifying the information.

The team of the DeFi project had also said that the suspected hacker had also given an on-chain response. Crema Finance asserted that they were working on verification and would then begin the negotiations.

Negotiation successful

As it turns out, the decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol turned out to be successful in their negotiations with the hacker. The latter decided to return two large quantities of the ETH and SOL tokens and instead opted to claim a bounty of 45,455 SOL tokens.

Crema Finance stated that the negotiations had taken time, but the hacker had agreed on a white hat bounty. They said that they had received 23,967.9 SOL tokens and 6,064 ETH tokens in four separate transactions. The team added that they would disclose a compensation program in the next 48 hours.

DeFi getting hacked

This is certainly not the first hack to occur on the decentralized finance (DeFi) platform in 2022. In the first three months of the year, DeFi protocols, exchanges, and people part of the crypto space had suffered losses of $1.3 billion in crypto assets. Of these total exploits, 97% of them had happened on DeFi platforms.

As for the second quarter of the year, a total of $670 million in crypto assets had been compromised in exploits on DeFi protocols. Most of the crypto that was stolen in the second quarter of the year had come from four major projects, which include DeFi Protocol, Mirror Protocol, Harmony Horizon Bridge, and Beanstalk.

Just before Crema Finance announced its successful negotiations, it also asserted that a new codebase had been submitted for auditing to Slowmist, a blockchain security firm. Its team said that once the audit is complete, the protocol would go live once more. The fact that Crema was able to get its funds back is a very rare occurrence.

Not all DeFi platforms have managed to retrieve their funds in this way, even though many have tried to negotiate.