After Hacking $600 million Poly Network Hacker Starts Returning Funds

There’s some interesting developments taking place in and around the Poly Network over the last 24 hours. On Tuesday, August 10, in one of the biggest attacks in the DeFi space, hackers siphoned off $611 million worth of digital currencies from a blockchain-based financial network dubbed the Poly Network.

This was probably one of the latest heist in the history of crypto industry. The Poly Network is a cross-chain decentralized finance (DeFi) platform allowing users to swap tokens across multiple blockchains like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and others.

However, on Tuesday, some identified actors explored a vulnerability between “contract calls” thereby successfully plundering thousands of digital tokens such as Ethereum (ETH).

The hackers managed to steal assets from Binance Chain, Polygon, and Ethereum networks and transferred them to different wallets. However, in an open letter, the Poly Network maintainers urged the thieves to establish communication and “return the hacked assets”.

The team wrote: "The amount of money you have hacked is one of the biggest in DeFi history. Law enforcement in any country will regard this as a major economic crime and you will be pursued. [...] The money you stole are from tens of thousands of crypto community members, hence the people”.

On the other hand, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao also assured taking due diligence of the matter. He wrote: "We are aware of the poly.network exploit that occurred today. While no one controls BSC (or ETH), we are coordinating with all our security partners to proactively help. There are no guarantees. We will do as much as we can”.

But in an interesting turn of events, an address associated with the hacker has now started returning funds. As per the data on Polygon Scan, the hacker’s Polygon address first sent $10,000 in USDC to a wallet set up by the Poly Network. Fifteen minutes later, the hacker sent another $1 million.

Before starting to return the funds, the hacker also embedded a mysterious message along with the transaction. The hacker wrote: "ACCEPT DONATIONS TO "THE HIDDEN SIGNER" NOW. ENCRYPT YOUR MSG WITH HIS PUBKEY.”

Earlier today, the hackers showed their intent of returning the funds. However, they said that they couldn’t get in touch with the Poly Network and thus asked for multi signature wallets.

Later, the Poly Network prepared three wallets on Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, and Polygon. It looks like the hacker’s intention was less to steal but more to explore the vulnerabilities in the Poly Network.