DeFi lender Venus Protocol announced that it had officially returned stolen assets to the victim of a phishing exploit last week.
“After conducting diligence checks … We have officially returned @KuanSun1990’s positions worth $11.4M at today’s token prices,” the protocol said in a post on social media platform X.
On Sept. 2, Eureka Trading CEO and large Venus user Kuan Sun had his funds drained after he signed a malicious transaction on a fake Zoom client that granted token approvals to an attacker. The stolen funds, composed of USDT, USDC, FDUSD and others, were valued at around $13 million at the time of the incident.
While Venus explained that the platform was not exploited, it paused its operations 20 minutes after the incident to launch an investigation. According to the platform’s post-incident analysis, it took the platform less than 12 hours to find out the issue and recover the funds.
The platform’s strategy involved conducting a rapid security audit to confirm the platform’s safety and executing a community-approved forced liquidation of the attacker’s wallet. Venus credited on-chain security firms PeckShield, Hexagate, and Hypernative Labs for their assistance in the effort.
“Their quick reaction was what made everything possible,” Sun wrote in an X post last Thursday. “Pausing the protocol was one of the hardest calls imaginable — it meant facing pressure, criticism, and risk. But they made that call in seconds, because protecting users came first.”
Venus Protocol’s prompt response to the incident was also widely lauded by the crypto community on social media channels, as phishing scams in DeFi remain on an uptrend.
According to blockchain security firm CertiK’s mid-year report, phishing attacks accounted for $410 million in losses from crypto users in the first half of 2025 across 132 incidents.
Launched in 2020, Venus Protocol is a decentralized lending market best known for its deployment on BNB Chain and additional rollouts on Ethereum, opBNB, Arbitrum, Optimism, and zkSync. It allows users to supply collateral, borrow assets, and mint the VAI stablecoin, with governance via the Venus (XVS) token.
Despite an initial steep drop following the incident, XVS has recovered to its pre-event price levels, according to CoinGecko data. The token is up 1.4% in the past day to trade at $6.28.
