One of the most unusual cryptocurrency heists in recent memory has come to a close. On Monday, Poly Network, a decentralized finance platform that saw a hacker named “Mr. White Hat” exploit a vulnerability in its code to steal $610 million in Ethereum, Shiba Inu and other cryptocurrencies, says it has recovered all the money it lost in the theft.
“At this point, all the user assets that were transferred during the incident have been fully recovered,” the company said in a Medium post. Poly Network is now working to return control of those digital currencies to their rightful owners, a process the company says it hopes to complete as soon as possible.
The Poly Network hack took one strange turn after another. Less than a day after stealing the digital currencies, the hacker started returning millions and sent a token indicating they were “ready to surrender.” Everything was going smoothly until they locked more than $200 million in assets in an account that required passwords from both them and Poly Network. They said they would only provide their password once everyone was “ready.” At that point, Poly Network offered the hacker a $500,000 reward.
It’s unclear why the perpetrator had a change of heart, though some experts believe they may have found it difficult to launder and cash out the money they had on their hands. All we have to go on from the hacker is that they were trying to help in their own way.
“My actions, which may be considered weird, are my efforts to contribute to the security of the Poly project in my personal style,” the hacker said in a message they included with the final transaction, according to CNBC. “The consensus was reached in a painful and obscure way, but it works.”
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