Just saw the DOJ unsealed charges against Andean Medjedovic, the hacker behind those massive DeFi exploits. This guy stole $65 million total—$16.5 million from Indexed Finance back in 2021 and then hit KyberSwap for around $46 million. Wild story actually.

So who is this person? Medjedovic graduated high school at 14 in Waterloo, Canada, then finished a math degree at University of Waterloo in three years by age 17. For context, Vitalik Buterin also studied there but dropped out. A Waterloo math professor literally told Bloomberg he'd never seen anyone finish that degree that early. The guy was clearly brilliant with numbers.

But here's where it gets darker. Medjedovic developed serious coding skills, won prizes in Code4rena hacking competitions, and got obsessed with DeFi—specifically AMMs. He'd study new protocols and throw money at them. Problem was, classmates described him as condescending and arrogant, and he apparently had some really disturbing views. According to reports, he dabbled in racist and anti-Semitic ideology. When he hacked Indexed Finance, his wallet address literally contained Neo-Nazi references and his code had racial slurs throughout.

The Indexed Finance hack in October 2021 was technically clever though. Medjedovic noticed a mispricing opportunity in their smart contract reindexing logic. He borrowed millions in tokens to distort their liquidity pools and exploited the glitch to steal $16.5 million. After the hack, he skipped his Canadian court hearing in December 2021 and went underground—bouncing around Europe and South America.

Then came KyberSwap. The DOJ says Medjedovic used hundreds of millions in borrowed crypto to create artificial prices, then exploited KyberSwap's AMM system to steal nearly $49 million. After that, he allegedly tried to extort the protocol developers, demanding complete control of the company, their governance token, all documents, and company assets in exchange for returning the funds. Pretty bold move.

He tried laundering through mixers and bridge protocols, but one bridge caught on and froze his transactions. According to prosecutors, he even offered an undercover agent $80,000 to help him bypass the restrictions and access $500,000 in stolen crypto.

As of now, Medjedovic is still at large. The US is working with international authorities including Dutch law enforcement. It's a reminder of how technical brilliance doesn't automatically equal good judgment, and why security audits matter so much in DeFi protocols.