Hacker hijacks Circle CSO’s Twitter account

According to an official statement published on March 22 by Circle, the company that is responsible for issuing the stablecoin known as USD Coin (USDC), the Twitter account of Dante Disparte, who serves as both the chief strategy officer (CSO) and director of global policy, has been hacked. 

The account was taken down by Twitter minutes after reports of the hack made rounds.

It has been alleged that the account associated with Disparte started pushing bogus loyalty benefits to long-time customers of USDC in a Tweet that has since been removed.

Before the account was compromised, Disparte’s account tweeted about the company’s involvement in the current Paris Blockchain Week and the regulatory changes that the company was following. 

When this article was written, four tweets that the suspected con artist had published using Disparte’s identity had been deleted. Three postings are still up, providing general commentary on current events involving USDC.

The security vulnerability occurred less than a month after the stablecoin depegged due to reserve deposits left in the custody of the now-defunct US tech bank Silicon Valley Bank. The problem has subsequently been fixed, and USDC has re-pegged. However, there is still a minimal deviation between the stablecoin’s peg and the original value when this article was written.

What happened after USDC’s depeg

Crypto whales have experienced significant losses due to the USDC depegging episode. Not long after that, fraudulent Circle profiles started cropping up on several social networking platforms with the promise of restoring consumers’ lost assets. 

Even though the peg has been substantially restored, the USDCs redeemed for fiat US dollars since the beginning of the month have come dangerously close to exceeding $10 billion.

According to reports, some decentralized finance protocols, such as those of DAI stablecoin issuer Maker DAO’s peg stability module, had USDC hard coded as 1:1 in their smart contracts rather than reflecting the value of the cryptocurrency on the market at the time.

When the event occurred, Maker DAO submitted an emergency request to decrease its 3.1 billion USDC reserve exposure, which was utilized to collateralize DAI. At the time of writing, there was still a little difference between DAI and the US dollar, although USDC and DAI had substantially repaired their pegs with the US currency.