US authorities seize $31 million in crypto linked to 2021 Uranium Finance hack

U.S. authorities have seized $31 million worth of cryptocurrency linked to the April 2021 hack of Uranium Finance, which resulted in a loss of $50 million.In a Monday post on X, the Southern District of New York urged victims of the Uranium Finance hack to contact law enforcement officials, as the SDNY and the Homeland Security Investigations in San Diego have confiscated $31 million in crypto believed to be connected to the hack.Now-defunct Uranium was an automated market maker protocol deployed on the BNB chain, which was called Binance Smart Chain at the time. In April 2021, it suffered an exploit while migrating its protocol to a newer version and lost $50 million. The attackers exploited a bug in Uranium Finance’s smart contract to swap a single token for almost all other tokens in the protocol’s liquidity pool.Though Uranium was a fork of SushiSwap, another popular decentralized exchange on Ethereum, the protocol’s team didn’t correctly adapt the code, leaving the protocol open to attack.The exploiter initially laundered the stolen funds via crypto mixer Tornado Cash. Later, according to pseudonymous blockchain sleuth ZachXBT, they used "Magic: The Gathering" trading cards to further launder their proceeds.Disclaimer: The Block is an independent media outlet that delivers news, research, and data. As of November 2023, Foresight Ventures is a majority investor of The Block. Foresight Ventures invests in other companies in the crypto space. Crypto exchange Bitget is an anchor LP for Foresight Ventures. The Block continues to operate independently to deliver objective, impactful, and timely information about the crypto industry. Here are our current financial disclosures.© 2025 The Block. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.