Was Celsius the ‘biggest victim’ in the recent BadgerDAO exploit?

Bitcoin DeFi tool BadgerDAO suffered a major attack earlier this week, and according to the current speculation, one of the most affected addresses that lost nearly 900 Bitcoin could be owned by Celsius.

The popular lending platform that enables users to earn interest on deposited crypto hasn’t confirmed the claims, but on-chain data gives credence to the rumors that are spreading on social media.

Transaction history reveals

The address flagged as the biggest victim of the BadgerDAO attack lost 896 Wrapped Bitcoin, worth roughly $51 million.

In the exploit’s aftermath, rumors started circulating social media, including Reddit and Twitter, that the affected address is tied to Celsius.

“Despite Celsius’s efforts to convince the community that they did not lose 900 BTC as a result of the hack, the on-chain transactions prove the opposite,” wrote one user, who goes by the name BigTimeCali on Twitter.

Indeed, an on-chain dive reveals the victim’s transaction history with an address that, at the time of writing, has a $65,6 million balance, of which almost $40 million is in Celsius’ native token CEL. This address regularly interacts with one of Celsius major addresses tagged as “Celsius Network: Wallet 5.”

“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,” concluded the post on Reddit.

The aftermath

By compromising BadgerDAO’s front-end interface, the attacker stole roughly $120 million in user funds, although the decentralized autonomous organization still hasn’t officially confirmed the scope of the damage.

In the meantime, the exploited protocol, which paused smart contracts in order to prevent further withdrawals, assured that the investigation continues.

The investigation continues.

Badger has retained data forensics experts Chainalysis to explore the full scale of the incident & authorities in both the US & Canada have been informed & Badger is cooperating fully with external investigations as well as proceeding with its own.

— ₿adgerDAO 🦡 (@BadgerDAO) December 2, 2021

“Badger has retained data forensics experts Chainalysis to explore the full scale of the incident & authorities in both the US & Canada have been informed & Badger is cooperating fully with external investigations as well as proceeding with its own,” wrote the protocol on Twitter.