Decentralized finance lender Venus Protocol announced on Sunday that it had successfully returned assets stolen from a phishing attack last week, resolving one of the largest individual security incidents to hit the platform.
In a post on X, the protocol confirmed it had restored positions worth $11.4 million to Kuan Sun, CEO of Eureka Trading and a major Venus user. Sun lost access to roughly $13 million on Sept. 2 after unknowingly signing a malicious transaction on a fake Zoom client, which granted token approvals to an attacker. The stolen assets included USDT, USDC, FDUSD, and other stablecoins.
Venus emphasized that the exploit did not target its own smart contracts. Instead, the team paused the protocol just 20 minutes after the incident was detected to ensure the platform’s integrity and begin recovery operations. Within 12 hours, Venus identified the issue, ran a rapid security audit, and coordinated with on-chain security specialists PeckShield, Hexagate, and Hypernative Labs.
The recovery plan included a community-approved forced liquidation of the attacker’s wallet, which enabled Venus to reclaim the stolen positions. “Pausing the protocol was one of the hardest calls imaginable,” Sun wrote in response on X, praising the protocol’s quick action. “But they made that call in seconds, because protecting users came first.”
The move was widely welcomed across crypto social channels, with users noting that phishing scams — rather than direct protocol exploits — have increasingly become the largest source of losses in DeFi. A mid-year report by blockchain security firm CertiK recorded $410 million lost to phishing across 132 incidents in the first half of 2025 alone.
Launched in 2020, Venus Protocol is one of the largest lending markets on BNB Chain, with additional deployments on Ethereum, opBNB, Arbitrum, Optimism, and zkSync. It allows users to borrow against collateral, supply liquidity, and mint its native stablecoin VAI, with governance conducted through the Venus (XVS) token.
Following the incident, XVS initially fell but has since rebounded. According to CoinGecko, the token is trading at $6.28, up 1.4% in the last 24 hours, suggesting investor confidence in the platform’s response and resilience.
