The hacker responsible for a $610 million attack on the cross-chain decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Poly Network has returned almost all of the stolen funds amid the project saying their actions constituted “white hat behaviour.”
According to updates on the attack from Poly Network, all $610 million in funds taken in an exploit that used “a vulnerability between contract calls” have now been transferred to a multisig wallet controlled by the project and the hacker. The only remaining tokens are the roughly $33 million in Tether (USDT), which were frozen immediately following news of the attack.
The hacker had been communicating with the Poly Network team and others through embedded messages in Ethereum transactions. They seemed to have not planned to transfer the funds after successfully stealing them, and claimed to do the hack “for fun” because “cross-chain hacking is hot.”
However, after speaking with the project and users, the hacker returned $258 million of the funds . Poly Network said it determined that the attack constituted “white hat behaviour” and offered the hacker, whom it dubbed “Mr. White Hat,” a $500,000 bounty.
