Poly Network said that all of the funds except $33 million of the $600 million worth stolen in one of the biggest cryptocurrency heists have been received.

The issuer of tether used a built-in failsafe to freeze the assets soon after the theft. Tether is a stable coin pegged to the U.S. dollar.

An anonymous person who claims to be the hacker said that he/she had done it for fun and they were “ready to return” the funds. The hackers, whose identity still remains known, said that their plan was always to eventually return the funds. Poly Network disclosed the hack in a Twitter post last Tuesday.

Poly Network had requested the hackers to send the funds to three assets currency wallets. And the hacker had surprisingly returned more than $342 million of the funds to those wallets by Thursday (August 12th, 2021).

But almost $268 million of tether digital coins are locked in an account that requires passwords from Poly Network and the hacker to gain access.

Tom Robinson who is the chief scientist of Elliptic, a blockchain analytics firm, commented in a blog post on Friday, “It’s likely that keys held by both Poly Network and the hacker would be required to move the funds — so the hacker could still make these funds inaccessible if they chose to.”

The suspected hacker said in a message that was embedded in a digital currency transaction, that they would “provide the final key when _everyone_ is ready.” Poly Network is waiting for the hacker to provide access (the final key) to the wallet which contains the remaining assets.

Poly Network said that it will offer a reward worth $500,000 to the hacker, referred to as Mr White Hat.

Poly Network is a decentralized finance platform. It uses digital assets for lending and other financial transactions. Some hackers exploited a vulnerability in Poly Network’s code and transferred tokens to their own crypto wallets because of which the platform lost more than $610 million of digital coins. The incident has further strengthened people’s fear of risk to trade in the crypto market.

Rushali Das

CBW - External Analyst

INDIA