Benzinga | Aug 11, 2021 09:11PM EDT

Poly Network Hacker Returns $260M In Crypto After Biggest DeFi Hack To Date

What Happened: In an unlikely turn of events, the exploiter that stole over $600 million worth of funds from DeFi protocol Poly Network has now begun sending some of it back.

At the time of writing, $260 million worth of tokens were sent through a series of transactions.

So far, the hacker has returned $3.3 million in Ethereum (CRYPTO: ETH), $256 million in BSC, $1 million in Polygon (CRYPTO: MATIC).

The remaining assets are $269M on Ethereum, $84M on Polygon.

Why It Matters: Members of the crypto community on Twitter speculated on a number of reasons as to why the hacker had an apparent change in heart.

Some argued that blockchain Security firm Slowmist's claims of identifying the hacker's IP and email information and linking its digital footprint to a Chinese crypto exchange Hoo had scared the hacker into cooperation.

Others hypothesized that the entire exploit was orchestrated as an inside job by the Poly Network team itself.

At 4:00 UTC time on Wednesday, the hacker declared he was "Ready to return the fund" in a message encrypted in a transaction to his own address.

Poly Network subsequently shared details of three multi-sig addresses on Polygon, Ethereum, and Binance Smart Chain on Twitter while stating that they hoped the hacker would transfer the remaining assets.

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