After a heist of $600 million, the Polynetwork hacker has agreed to return the funds for which he has asked for a multisig wallet.
On Tuesday the news came out informing a $600 million heist from Polynetwork, the biggest DeFi heist to date. But later on August 11, the hacker has stated to return the funds, suddenly giving a new turn to the heist.
About $267m of ethereum (ETH-USD), $252m of Binance coin (BNB-USD), and roughly $85m in USDC tokens were taken, according to wallet addresses posted on Twitter.
In a letter by Polygon on Twitter, the company asked the hacker to return the stolen digital assets. According to the letter, “Law enforcement in any country will regard this as a major crime and you will be pursued”.
Surprisingly to which the hacker has paid attention. Around 4:00 UTC on Wednesday, the hacker wrote “Ready to return the fund!” in an Ethereum transaction sent from Polynetwork’s hacker address to itself. This message was followed by another one that reads: “Failed to contact the Poly. I need a secured multisig wallet from you.”
20 minutes later, the Polynetwork team responded to the message through a transaction that it is “preparing a multi-sig address controlled by known Poly addresses.”
Around 8:00 UTC the hacker sent $1 million in USD coin (USDC) on the Polygon blockchain. Polynetwork confirmed the transaction stating: “You are moving things to the right direction. We received 1+M USDC on Polygon. Did you ask us to encrypt the receiving addresses with your BookKeeper public key?”
This incident could be a hit to the confidence in the rapidly-growing but early-stage decentralized finance (DeFi) industry. According to an April report by crypto research company Messari, DeFi protocols have lost about $285 million to hacks and other exploits since 2019.
