Poly Network, a Cryptocurrency platform has written an open letter to hackers asking them to return the funds it (the platform) claims they stole.
This happens to be one of the greatest heist of all times as hackers were claimed to have stolen $600m (£435m) in digital assets. Poly Network grants its users access to swap cryptocurrency tokens across different blockchains.
The company said a vulnerability in its system allowed the attacker to transfer these tokens to public blockchain addresses they controlled. The value of the tokens dropped below $400m (£290m) following the news of the theft.
In monetary value, the heist would be one of the biggest to hit the cryptocurrency world, comparable to the theft of 850,000 bitcoin from the Mt Gox exchange in 2014 – worth $450m (£326m) at the time.
According to Poly Network’s tweets, the stolen tokens amounted to more than $270m (£196m) from the ethereum blockchain, $250m (£181m) on the Binance Smart Chain, and $84m (£61m) on the Polygon network, according to Police.
In its open letter addressed “Dear Hacker,” the company said it wanted to establish communication with the thieves and stressed that the stolen funds “are from tens of thousands of crypto community members, hence the people”.
However by Wednesday afternoon UK time, the Poly Network tweeted that it had received more than $4m back from the addresses to which the hacker transferred the stolen tokens and senior executives at exchanges across the cryptocurrency community are offering to blacklist the addresses which the criminals sent the stolen funds to in an attempt to recover them.
As indicated by the immediate drop in the value of the stolen tokens, the incident brings to light, the perils of decentralised finance (DeFi) systems which are less regulated than traditional markets.
Poly Network tweeted that it had uncovered the vulnerability which allowed the attacker to make the transactions, blaming an issue in a system for contract calls.
There are some mechanisms to recapture stolen cryptocurrency tokens, but they are rarely successful.
Although the simplest way to end the heist would be for the hacker(s) to simply transfer back the stolen tokens, this is unlikely to happen as some have already been moved to other accounts.
