Droppin’ 🇺🇸

The Binance hacker might have just executed one of the most brilliant moves in crypto. First, Tether froze $1.5 billion worth of USDT. Then Circle followed by freezing another $800 million in USDC. At that point, it seemed like the hacker’s funds were completely trapped. But apparently, he had already thought several steps ahead. Rather than keeping the stolen USDT in a wallet, he allegedly deposited it into Aave and used it as collateral to borrow ETH. Then he walked away. And this is where things get really interesting. Tether can freeze the USDT sitting in that wallet. But it can’t freeze the ETH that was already borrowed. So now, Aave is left with frozen collateral, while the hacker is holding liquid ETH. And unless the protocol finds a way to recover those funds, he might not even have to repay the loan. Two companies froze billions of dollars in seconds. Yet someone who understood how DeFi works may have found a way to bypass both restrictions. Pretty wild when you think about it.