Hackers responded to Poly Network’s request and returned the stolen US$600 million of US$260 million to Poly Network | Technology News

A blockchain researcher said on Wednesday that the hackers behind the largest cryptocurrency theft in history have returned more than one-third of the roughly $600 million in digital coins. Poly Network is a decentralized financial platform that facilitates peer-to-peer transactions. It announced a hack on Twitter and released details of the digital wallet to which the tokens were sent.

According to a blockchain analyst, at the time of the announcement, the value of the coins in the wallet had just exceeded $600 million. Poly Networks later urged hackers to return the stolen funds to several of its digital addresses and said it planned to take legal action.

According to data from public blockchain records and encryption tracking company Elliptic, by late afternoon, approximately $258 million in stolen tokens had been returned.

Tom Robinson, co-founder of Ellipic, said that this extraordinary move may be due to the trouble caused by such a large-scale cleaning of stolen cryptocurrencies.

Poly Network did not respond to requests for more details regarding the robbery or the return of funds. It is not clear where the platform is or whether any law enforcement agencies are investigating the robbery.

The scale of the theft is comparable to the $530 million digital coins stolen from Tokyo Exchange Coincheck in 2018. The Gox exchange, also located in Tokyo, closed in 2014 after losing $5 billion in Bitcoin.

The latest attack comes as losses caused by theft, hacking, and fraud related to decentralized finance (DeFi) hit a record high, which increases the risk of investments in the industry and regulators seeking to crack down on it.

The DeFi platform allows financial transactions, usually cryptocurrencies, without the need for traditional gatekeepers such as banks or exchanges. The industry has flourished in the past year, and the platform now handles digital coins worth more than 80 billion U.S. dollars.

Poly Network allows users to exchange tokens between different blockchains.

Stolen password

Retrieving part of the tokens highlights the difficulty of cleaning up a large number of stolen cryptocurrencies.

Elliptic’s Robinson said: “The public is very concerned about this, and the exchange will pay close attention to customer deposits related to this theft.”

“This shows that even if you can steal encrypted assets, money laundering and cashing are extremely difficult due to the transparency of the blockchain and the widespread use of blockchain analysis by financial institutions.”

Robinson added that the hacker sent a message containing some returned coins and appeared to be asking for donations.

According to a report by CipherTrace, a crypto intelligence company, the amount of stolen funds exceeded the record criminal losses of $474 million recorded by the entire DeFi department from January to July.

Proponents of DeFi say it provides people and businesses with free access to financial services, believing that the technology will reduce costs and promote economic activity. However, it is mostly unregulated, and the code used on many platforms has technical flaws and weaknesses, making it vulnerable to hacker attacks and robberies. Please also read: The Delhi government launched 33 “anonymous” RTO services to check how to use online facilities

An executive of Tether (a stablecoin or a cryptocurrency that is usually backed by real-world assets) stated on Twitter that the company has frozen $33 million related to hacking, the top management of a large cryptocurrency exchange The staff responded to Poly Network saying that they will also try to help. Please also read: The Ministry of Transport revises two plans to promote the adoption of electric vehicles