Two months after hackers drained nearly $24 million from Ostium, a lender seeking roughly $15 million dragged the DEX's private recovery plan into court.
- Ostium, an Arbitrum-based decentralized perpetuals exchange, lost more than 23.7 million USDC from its liquidity-provider vault on July 15 after attackers compromised its off-chain price-reporting infrastructure and fed fake prices into the protocol.
- Trader collateral wasn't affected, though.
But the hack was only part of Ostium's problem. In September, ESS Frontier, a company that took over the claims of Hong Kong-based lender Minghui Zheng, sued Ostium in New York federal court over roughly $15 million in crypto loans.
The lender asked the court to temporarily freeze some of Ostium's assets while the dispute moved toward arbitration.
A judge granted that request on Sept. 5, but Judge Lewis Kaplan paused the freeze a week later while the court considered whether it should remain in place.
A recovery plan spills into court
The fight also exposed information Ostium says was supposed to remain confidential. Ostium's lawyers accused the plaintiffs of breaching a non-disclosure agreement by putting details of the DEX's restructuring framework into public court filings.
The disclosure had "already caused injury" to Ostium's business interests, its lawyers told the court, arguing that continued exposure was causing "irreparable harm."
From the public filings, the plan appears to have been a creditor repayment deal, with Ostium trying to pay lenders back over time under revised terms rather than all at once.
- The documents mention different recovery rates, valuations and asset allocations, but the key numbers were sealed, so it's not clear how much creditors were actually being offered or how the plan would have worked in practice.
The court heard arguments on the dispute on Sept. 17. No subsequent public ruling was available in the sources reviewed by The Coinformer at publication time.