Whitehat Hacker Drains $209K from Renegade, Returns $190K

A whitehat hacker exploited a vulnerability in the Renegade decentralized trading protocol's V1 dark pool on the Arbitrum network early Sunday, draining approximately 209,000 in cryptocurrency before returning nearly 190,000 of the funds hours later following an onchain negotiation with the protocol's team.

Blockchain security platform Blockaid detected the incident at 8:27 a.m. UTC, when the attacker injected malicious code into a faulty function linked to the dark pool's resolver infrastructure. The theft involved 27 ERC20 tokens. Blockchain explorer Arbiscan records show the hacker transferred about 190,000 back to a Renegade-controlled wallet at address 0xE4A5CFBE, including 84,370 in USDC, 27,885 in wrapped Bitcoin and 23,950 in wrapped Ether.

Renegade quickly responded with an onchain message offering the attacker 10 percent of the stolen funds as a whitehat bounty in exchange for returning the rest, while warning of potential civil or criminal action if the offer was refused. The hacker complied within 45 minutes and replied onchain, stating, "Although I understand that what I did was not ethical, in the current context of DeFi cybersecurity, I believe this was the best...