French Police Arrest Two in $9.1M Platypus Crypto Hack
According to local authorities, two individuals were apprehended by French police in connection with the Platypus exploit, which resulted in a loss of $9.1 million.
Furthermore, authorities have confiscated 210,000 euros ($222,000) worth of cryptocurrency.
The investigations that led to the arrests were aided by on-chain detective ZachXBT and the cryptocurrency exchange Binance, Platypus disclosed. On Feb. 16, the same attacker exploited the decentralized protocol in three flash loan attacks.
The attacks resulted in the loss of various stablecoins and digital assets.
The first attack resulted in the loss of around $8.5 million in assets. In the second attack, roughly $380,000 in assets were mistakenly transferred to the Aave v3 contract. In the third attack, about $287,000 was stolen, resulting in the Platypus USD (USP) stablecoin losing its peg to the US dollar.
READ MORE: Altcoin Surges Almost 250% Since the Beginning of the Year – What to Expect?
Platypus recently confirmed that the perpetrators employed a flash loan technique to exploit a logic flaw in the USP solvency check mechanism within the collateral-holding system. Stable swap operations have not been affected.
On Feb. 23, Platypus announced a plan to return funds to impacted users. The protocol intends to reimburse 63% of the primary pool funds within six months. According to the plan, reminting frozen stablecoins could recover 78% of the funds. The protocol added, “If our proposal submitted to Aave is approved and Tether confirms reminting the frozen USDT, we will recover approximately 78% of users’ funds.“
Alexander Stefanov
Reporter at CoinsPress
Alex is Editor-in-Chief of Coinspress and co-founder of Millennial Media Group, with nearly a decade of experience covering financial markets - crypto first, then everything else. It started in 2016 with Bitcoin. Like most people at the time, he didn't fully understand it - so he kept digging. Blockchain, tokenomics, the projects, the cycles. That curiosity never stopped, and eventually pulled him into traditional markets too: equities, commodities, macro. Not because he left crypto behind, but because you can't properly understand one without the other. What drives him is straightforward: he wants to know why something is happening, not just that it's happening. Most market coverage stops at the headline - price up, price down, here's a chart. Alex finds that kind of reporting actively unhelpful. If you walk away from an article without understanding the mechanism behind the move, what did you actually learn? He holds a degree in Tourism from New Bulgarian University - not the most obvious path into financial markets, but markets have a way of pulling in people who are simply too curious to stay out. He has authored over 200 in-depth analyses and more than 10,000 articles across crypto and traditional finance. He still thinks every day in markets teaches him something new. That's probably why he hasn't stopped.
