Poly Network Rewards ‘White Hat’ Hacker with a $500,000 Bug Bounty

On August 13, Poly Network confirmed it had offered the hacker or hackers responsible for its $610M loss a ‘mistake reward’ of $500,000.

In a statement, Poly gratified the hacker’s decision to return the bulk funds. The dubbed name is an industry term for an ethical hacker whose purpose is to expose vulnerabilities in the Poly Network’s system.

What Next After the Reward?

The network hopes that “Mr. White Hat” would aid in developing the blockchain sector after he accepted the $500,000 reward they offered as a part of the return of the hacked coins negotiations.

On Thursday, some virtual messages shared by Tom Robinson via Twitter showed the person who claimed to have masterminded the hack and been offered a bounty in return for the stolen assets.

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A not-so-popular name in the crypto world before Tuesday’s heist, Poly Network is a DeFi platform that allows peer-to-peer network transactions. It mainly focuses on allowing users to move tokens through various blockchains.

According to Chainalysis, the unknown hacker took advantage of a weakness in the digital contracts that Poly Network uses to transfer assets across different blockchain networks.

Some blockchain analysts speculate that it may have been very challenging for the hackers to launder the stolen assets on such a large scale. However, the hackers had said in digital messages shared by Elliptic that the attack was for fun and that they planned to return the tokens.

Poly Network announced the attack on Tuesday. However, reports suggest that the hackers had already started returning the virtual coins they had stolen.

How Much was Returned?

According to Friday’s statement, ‘Mr. So far, white Hat has returned $340 million of the assets and transferred the rest to a digital wallet jointly controlled by them and Poly Network. Tether decided to freeze the remaining amount, about $33 million in USDT, since the hack.

Further, the statement reads that the network had learned Mr. White Hat’s true intentions and exactly how the situation unfolded without giving any other details.

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Experts say that the theft shows the risks of the largely unregulated DeFi sector. At $600 million, the Poly Network theft by far outstripped the previous record of $474 million in criminal losses recorded by the entire DeFi industry from January to July. However, Poly assures users that the hacker returned most of the funds.