As of 11:00 AM Hong Kong Time, the hackers of the Poly Network attack have returned approximately US$340 million, more than half of their total haul of over US$600 million.
Fast facts
- According to the last tweet from Poly Network, the hackers have returned tokens worth US$3.3 million on Ethereum, the total stolen tokens from the Binance Smart Chain worth US$256 million, and USD Coins worth US$1 million on the Polygon blockchain.
- According to Polygonscan, however, the hackers have also returned USD Coins worth around US$84 million on the Polygon blockchain. This means that the total USD Coins stolen on Polygon have been returned.
- Apart from USD Coins, the returned assets consist of Binance USD, Shiba Inu Coin, and Fei, an algorithmic stablecoin for decentralized finance (DeFi). Assets worth around US$269 million on the Ethereum blockchain are yet to be returned.
- While the perpetrators had started returning funds, they also engaged in a Q&A session on the Ethereum blockchain. Dovey Wan, the founder of Primitive Crypto, tweeted claims that they resorted to hacking to expose vulnerabilities in the Poly Network. They also revealed more details about the execution of the hack and said they were trying to “save the world” and had no intentions of laundering the funds.
- Despite the hackers’s claims and self-professed good intentions, several investors were affected by the hack, some of whom lost significant portions of their crypto savings.
- Swiss blockchain-based litigation finance company Liti Capital’s CIO David Kay remarked in a statement: “[The Poly Network hack] shows the ingenuity of the hackers and the need for the blockchain community to enhance stricter audit rule for their protocols. Cyber security needs to be a full inclusive process which safeguards not only protocols but also the assets of the investors. Without an intense focus on continuing to better our protocols, incidents like this are bound to happen again, which ultimately will reduce the overall credibility of the blockchain industry.”