Euler exploiter has been arrested in Paris

DL News reports that a 20-year-old Argentinian named Federico Jaime has claimed responsibility for the March 2023 Euler Finance exploit and says he was arrested in May at a Paris train station, where French authorities allegedly found him carrying €200,000 in cash. He told the outlet in a phone interview that he is being held in a minimum-security prison in Nanterre on what he describes as a “small money-laundering case,” which he characterises as unrelated to the roughly $200 million theft from Euler. DL News notes that it has not independently verified that Jaime is in fact the main Euler exploiter, and there is no public confirmation from French authorities or Euler Labs that ties his arrest formally to the DeFi hack. According to Jaime’s account, he independently discovered a vulnerability in Euler’s smart contracts and led the attack, later enlisting a student in Spain to help execute it before a falling-out between them. Euler Finance, a lending protocol developed by UK-based Euler Labs, was exploited on 13 March 2023 via a complex series of flash loans and liquidity manipulations, resulting in losses of about $197–200 million across assets including DAI, wBTC, stETH, and USDC. After on-chain negotiations and public messages from the attacker, Euler announced on 4 April 2023 that “all of the recoverable funds” had been returned, and the protocol then focused on restoring user assets. In the DL News interview, Jaime says some remaining funds that passed through the sanctioned mixer Tornado Cash were considered tainted and left with him, and he defends his use of the mixer while expressing an intention to help Euler rebuild its diminished total value locked. The case highlights ongoing legal and attribution challenges around major DeFi exploits, as well as the jurisdictional complexity when alleged perpetrators are arrested for traditional financial crimes rather than clearly labeled crypto-hacking charges.

✨ AI-generated background, compiled from web sources — not editorial content.

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