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PolyNetwork Hacking Saga: Most of the funds returned, says PolyNetwork

Karthik Subramanian

PolyNetwork, the network that has been affected by a $613 million hack, announced that most of the lost funds have been returned by the hacker over the last couple of days and talks are still going on to return the rest of the funds.

This was announced by the company on Twitter as it continues to be at the mercy of the hacker(s) for the return of the funds which are being returned into a multi-sig wallet that is controlled by both the company as well as the hacker(s). The hacker(s) seems to be a White Hacker who basically does hacking to exploit and show to the businesses the various vulnerabilities that are present in their system with no intention of any malice.

The hacker(s) has told the same as he said that they do not have any intention to steal the funds and it was all for fun and to show how vulnerable the smart contracts used by PolyNetwork were and he wanted to show it to the company before someone within the company or outside exploited it for their benefit. Though the company initially adopted a belligerent tone against the hacker(s), they have now mellowed down a lot and have even offered a $500,000 bounty to him along with a promise that he won’t be pursued any further.

Some of the crypto analysts have theorized that the hacker(s) has offered to return the funds as he was finding it difficult to move such huge funds in the ETH, BSC, and Polygon networks and they have complemented the blockchain networks and the communities for acting quickly for tracing the flow of funds and in some cases, freezing the assets so that they could not be moved around, which is a standard strategy for hackers.

This hack has been one of the largest in the crypto ecosystem and especially the largest in the DeFi history whose USP is that large funds would not be concentrated within a single contract or wallet thus making it less viable for hacking. The funds are supposed to be highly decentralized or distributed so that each wallet or contract would have very few funds within it. The fact that many of the major blockchain networks like Ethereum, BSC, and Polygon were affected does dent the confidence of the investors though those with in-depth knowledge of the workings of the network would realize that the hack was more to do with how the PolyNetwork developers handled the contract rather than a security loophole within the networks themselves.

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