Crypto lending firm Celsius reportedly affected in BadgerDAO exploit

Cryptocurrency lending platform Celsius has reportedly lost over $50 million in the exploit of decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol BadgerDAO.

As reported by Cointelegraph on Dec. 2, the attack targeted the protocol on the Ethereum network, reaping an unconfirmed $120 million in assets.

According to one Redditor, the biggest alleged victim of the hack was an address that lost 896 Wrapped Bitcoin ($51 million). The address is supposed to be owned by Celsius “since it has interacted with other addresses known to be owned by them.”

The address regularly transacts with an address that has a $67 million balance, $40 million of which is Celsius’ eponymous native token CEL.

The address is also alleged to be owned by Celsius as it is related to at least one address that is tagged as Celsius Network Wallet 5 on Etherscan as they share several major transactions.

“All this means that there’s a high chance that the address who lost 900 BTC was owned by Celsius. Celsius has not confirmed anything yet, so this is all speculation for now, so we don’t know for sure if Celsius was affected or not,” the user suggested.

Celsius did not immediately respond to Cointelegraph’s request for comment.

The first reports on BadgerDAO’s security breach surfaced in early December, with the protocol officially announcing that it received multiple exports of unauthorized withdrawals of user funds on Dec. 1. The Badger team continued investigating the issue and paused all smart contracts on the protocol to avoid any further losses.

The Celsius token experienced a notable drop in late November. After reaching $4.5 on Nov. 25, CEL dropped to as low as $3.9 the next day, slightly recovering since then. At the time of writing, CEL is trading at $4.00, which is down around 9% over the past seven days but up around 1% over the past 14 days.

Celsius Network is a major crypto lending platform, allowing users to earn interest on holding digital assets like Bitcoin (BTC). The company has emerged as one of the biggest players in DeFi, smashing a valuation between $3.5 billion after expanding its $400-million Series B funding round from October to $750 million in late November.