US Authorities Seize $31 Million Worth of Crypto Tied to Uranium Finance Hack

The seizure was the result of a collaborative effort between the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York and the Homeland Security Investigations in San Diego

US authorities have seized $31 million in crypto linked to the April 2021 hack of Uranium Finance, a now-defunct decentralized finance platform. The legal authorities involved in the case announced the seizure on Feb. 24.

According to the announcement, the crypto was seized in a joint effort by the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York and Homeland Security Investigations in San Diego, California.

The authorities provided no details on the identity of the hackers but requested that any victims of the hack reach out to them.

Uranium Finance was a BNB Chain fork of Uniswap, an automated market maker that launched its first version on April 1, 2021.

Following the attack on April 28, 2021, Uranium Finance's website was shut down, and its X account last posted on April 30, 2021, leaving victims without updates or a clear path to financial recovery until now. Around the time of the hack, one of the administrators of Uranium's Discord channel suggested that it might have been an inside job.

The hacker exploited bugs in the software code of Uranium's v2 smart contracts, allowing them to inflate the project's balance by a factor of 100 and extract funds.

This error resulted in the theft of $50 million from the project, including approximately $36.8 million in BNB (BNB) and Binance USD (BUSD) at the time.

The remaining stolen funds consisted of 80 Bitcoin (BTC), 1,800 Ether (ETH), 26,500 Polkadot (DOT), 5.7 million Tether (USDT), 638,000 Cardano (ADA) and 112,000 “U92” tokens, which were Uranium's native coin before the project was shut down.

After stealing the funds, the hacker reportedly converted the Polkadot and Cardano tokens into Ether, which was then laundered through crypto mixer Tornado Cash before being transferred to centralized crypto exchanges.

In addition to the main hack, another occurred on April 8, 2021, when hackers exploited Uranium's v1 platform pool, stealing $1.3 million in BNB and BUSD.

This earlier hack prompted Uranium to create a second version, which was launched on April 16 and exploited again about 12 days later.