On September 4, approximately $41.3 million dollars were stolen from Stake’s hot wallets. Stake temporarily suspended withdrawals and deposits for customers. Currently, everything is working as usual. According to the company's statements, the theft did not affect user funds.
What is Stake
Stake is a popular platform that allows users to bet on sports and play casino games using cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, and stablecoins on different blockchains. Stake has partnered with the famous artist Drake since 2022.
According to the Financial Times, in 2022, the platform's revenue was $2.6 billion. The partnership with Drake costs $100 million a year.
How Stake was hacked
On September 4, it was discovered that funds were withdrawn from different addresses on the Stake platform across various networks, including Ethereum, BNB Chain, and Polygon. As stated by Beosin, the total amount affected was about $41.3 million. You can see a detailed list of the stolen funds in the tweet below.
The hack is not related to smart contract exploits and differs from the recent Curve Finance hack. In this case, the attacker targeted Stake’s wallets directly; probably, the thief somehow gained access to the private keys and transferred the funds to their own wallets.
Stake's response
Stake’s team reacted quickly to the incident and suspended deposits and withdrawals for all customers. Additionally, the team said it would investigate what happened. Within about 5 hours, the platform resumed normal operations.
The co-founder of Stake, Ed Craven, noted that the company keeps only a small amount of funds in hot wallets in order to avoid such risks.
This incident serves as a good reminder of how to store crypto. Use cold wallets for long-term holdings and hot wallets for day-to-day transactions.
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