UNI price on a slippery slope after Uniswap exploit

Uniswap (UNI) price has turned red after a sudden surge earlier today. At press time, the UNI token was trading at $5.9929, down 0.37% after hitting a daily high of $6.07.

UNI has oscillated between $6.20 and $5.85 since the start of April after surging from $5.57 at the end of March. The price appeared to break out earlier today before turning red.

Why is Uniswap (UNI) price dropping?

Decentralized exchange Uniswap has been hit by a sophisticated sandwich attack resulting in the loss of cryptocurrencies worth about $25.2 million.

The hacker(s) targeted Uniswap pools and managed to exploit their vulnerability and steal substantial assets from the pools. The hacker effectively tricked the DEX into sending money to the hackers’ wallets.

Normally, a sandwich attack is a type of front-running scheme where an attacker places a large trade on either side of a target transaction with the aim of manipulating the price and profit from the resulting price change.

According to Etherscan transaction history, numerous MEV bots carried out sandwich trades and a validator was then used to replace the reverse transactions.

The validator behind the Uniswap attack was funded through the anonymous protocol Aztec suggesting the attack was well planned. The validator made the confidential deposit for the trades 18 days before the attack.

The attacker managed to steal 7,461 Wrapped Ether (WETH) worth $13.4 million, 5.3 million USD Coin (USDC), 3 million Tether (USDT), 65 Wrapped bitcoins (WBTC) worth $1.8 million, and 1.7 million DAI tokens.

The stolen money was tracked to eight different crypto wallet addresses probably suggesting that the attack was planned by a group of people.

Uniswap has since then taken action to remedy the exploit by asking users to continue being watchful in guarding their money.