Three projects built on the Solana blockchain are shutting down after a major hack targeting Step Finance earlier this year left losses that the team says cannot be recovered.
Step Finance, a popular Solana portfolio dashboard and DeFi aggregator, announced Monday that it will wind down operations following a $27 million breach of its treasury wallets in late January.
The shutdown also affects its subsidiaries, including NFT analytics platform SolanaFloor and lending protocol Remora Markets.
Step Finance to buyback STEP tokens
The firm stated that it considered several recovery possibilities, including new capital and prospective acquisitions, but was unable to find a viable way ahead.
As part of the closure process, Step Finance plans to conduct a buyback for STEP token holders using a pre-hack snapshot and will offer a redemption program for Remora rToken users.
Step Finance launches cybersecurity probe
Step Finance disclosed on January 31 that several of its treasury wallets had suffered a security breach, prompting the team to bring in cybersecurity firms to investigate the incident.
Blockchain security company CertiK later reported that about 261,854 SOL, valued at roughly $27 million at the time, was unstaked and transferred out during the attack.
The breach triggered immediate financial and operational stress for the project. Crypto investor Mike Dudas said Step Finance had approached him about joining a bridge funding round, but he requested a detailed security post-mortem before committing and never received a response.
Co-founder George Harrap later acknowledged that the team was exploring potential acquisitions of parts of the business but faced significant time pressure.
Market reaction to the news was severe with the platform’s native STEP token plunging 96 percent in the days after the hack and fell another 36 percent following the shutdown announcement.
The token is now trading near $0.00057. The drop marks a dramatic fall from its August 2021 all-time high of $10.20.