The biggest DeFi hit ever: Poly Network sees $600 million crypto heist

A decentralized finance (DeFi) cross-chain bridging protocol Poly Network recently announced that it has suffered an attack in which the hacker stole over $600 million across three blockchains.

The cross-chain interoperability network flagged the attacker’s addresses on Twitter, which revealed the extent of a massive exploit, urging miners of the affected blockchains and crypto exchanges to blacklist tokens coming from the hacker.

Historical heist

The combined value of stolen crypto exceeds $600 million on three blockchains, totaling roughly $273M on Ethereum, approximately $253M on Binance Smart Chain, and close to 85M on Polygon. 

After a preliminary investigation, the hacked protocol located the cause of the vulnerability, claiming that the attacker exploited a vulnerability between contract calls as it urged miners of the affected blockchains and crypto exchanges to blacklist tokens coming from the disclosed addresses. 

“We will take legal actions and we urge the hackers to return the assets,” said Poly Network on Twitter, while trying to establish communication with the attacker, inviting the new DeFi millionaire to talk to the protocol in order to “work out a solution.”

Actions and reactions

Following the attack, Tether, the world’s largest stablecoin, froze roughly $33 million in USDT associated with the alleged hacker’s wallet address, which led to ideological remarks on Twitter, questioning how decentralized is the DeFi corner of the space?

Meanwhile, some of the biggest crypto exchange operators spoke out, offering their help and support, including Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao, Huobi co-founder Du Jun and OKEx CEO Jay Hao.

While centralized exchanges also reacted showing support to the hacked protocol, blockchain security intelligence keeps trying to define the exploited vulnerability by retracing the attacker’s steps. 

In anticipation of the protocol’s post mortem…

The post The biggest DeFi hit ever: Poly Network sees $600 million crypto heist appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Read Entire Article


Add a comment