Earlier this week cryptocurrency platform Poly Network got hacked and the sum of $610 million was stolen in digital assets. The hackers who stole the fund claimed that they did it for fun and also because they wanted to be the first to announce the platform’s vulnerability which made the hack possible.
When the incident happened, Poly Network took to microblogging platform Twitter to express concerns urging the hackers to return the fund. It was, however, unknown if Poly Network had involved law enforcement or if it was taking steps apart from begging the hackers on Twitter, to recover the funds.
On Wednesday, $260 million was returned by the hackers, and the platform hoped that the hackers would return the rest of the funds. As of Thursday, the platform confirmed that more than half of the stolen assets have been recovered. This made the worth of the returned digital assets $342 million with over $200 million still unrecovered.
The Poly Network heist is being referred to as the biggest in the history of DeFi as it outweighs the Mt. Gox exchange case that saw the platform collapse in 2014 after losing half a billion dollars in bitcoin, the Coincheck’s case in 2018 in which the exchange lost $530 million worth of digital coins and the $474 million in criminal losses CipherTrace said were registered by the entire DeFi sector from January to July.
In a Friday statement, Poly Network said it is offering the hacker or hackers that robbed its platform of $610 million a $500,000 “bug bounty”. In the statement, the platform expressed thanks to the hacker(s) who was referred to as a “white hat”; (jargon for an ethical hacker who exposes cyber vulnerabilities) for returning a bulk of the stolen funds and for “helping usimprove Poly Network’s security”.
Poly Network also expressed hopes urging the hacker (s) to continue to contribute positively to the world of Blockchain after accepting the $500,000 reward. The $500,000 reward was offered by Poly Network during negotiations for the return of the stolen assets.
The statement revealed that the hacker(s) has responded to the offer but failed to say if they had accepted it. It also failed to say how the reward would be paid to the hacker(s).
Although the hacker(s) claimed to have stolen the funds for fun and to expose the platform’s vulnerability, blockchain experts are of the opinion that the stolen assets were returned as the hacker(s) had no clear path or plan on how to launder such a huge amount of money.
Ibhadojemu Lucky Emmanuel is a graduate of Education and Economics from the University of Benin. He has a passion for tech and business and has been writing professionally for over a period of five years. He's written across various topics and segments and knew tech-business was it when he first stumbled on it. He has a great passion for music and arts, and wants to visit as many countries as he can someday.
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