Poly Network has now recovered all of its hacked assets

Tether has released the final 33 million USDT of Poly Network’s assets, after hacker “Mr. White Hat” returned the rest

Cross-chain decentralised finance (DeFi) protocol Poly Network finished recovering all of its assets, according to a blog post published yesterday.

On 10 August, the protocol was the victim of the largest ever DeFi exploit, when it was attacked simultaneously on Ethereum, Polygon and Binance Smart Chain for a total of $611 million.

Poly Network published the attacker’s blockchain addresses and called on the crypto community to blacklist coins coming from these addresses. Tether was quick to respond, freezing about 33 million USDT in the ETH address.

The hacker, who has been dubbed “Mr. White Hat” by Poly Network, revealed the next day that they had carried out the exploit “for fun” in an on-chain AMA with themselves. By 12 August, Mr. White Hat had returned $342 million of the hacked assets and the following week, they were offered the job of Chief Security Advisor of Poly Network.

On Monday, the protocol revealed that the hacker had shared a private key to a multi-signature wallet containing the remaining $141 million in their possession. This meant that Poly Network had recovered all of the lost funds except the $33 million frozen by Tether, saying in the Monday blog post that they had been in “close communication” with the stablecoin issuer and were following “Tether’s standard process”.

Yesterday’s blog post confirmed that that process was complete and Tether had released the 33,431,200 USDT into Poly Network’s designated multi-sig address.

https://twitter.com/Tether_to/status/1430510652582416387  

Recovering the assets was phase four of Poly Network’s recovery roadmap and the protocol is now moving onto phase five, namely, resuming services. The Poly Bridge has reestablished cross-chain functionality for 59 different assets, with more services to open up more gradually due to “security reasons”.

Poly Network is also launching a bug bounty programme on Immunefi with a $500,000 prize pool to detect any other potential vulnerabilities in the protocol.

“Poly Network would like to thank Tether for their prompt assistance right from the beginning of the incident,” read yesterday’s blog post, “and we appreciate the support and understanding of our users as they patiently awaited the recovery of their assets.”