At 6am ET on August 10, over half a billion dollars worth of crypto assets were stolen from Poly Network, a cross-chain protocol that facilitates token swaps across multiple blockchains including Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain and Polygon.
With the total drained at $600M, this is the biggest DeFi hack in history, dwarfing the $59M EasyFi exploit that held the unenviable record until now.
According to the project, the attacker was able to “exploit a vulnerability between contract calls” and steal $270M worth of Ethereum-based assets, $250M of assets on Binance Smart Chain, and nearly $85M USDC on Polygon.
Important Notice:
We are sorry to announce that #PolyNetwork was attacked on @BinanceChain @ethereum and @0xPolygon Assets had been transferred to hacker's following addresses:
ETH: 0xC8a65Fadf0e0dDAf421F28FEAb69Bf6E2E589963
BSC: 0x0D6e286A7cfD25E0c01fEe9756765D8033B32C71— Poly Network (@PolyNetwork2) August 10, 2021
Poly Network is a cross-chain protocol for swapping tokens across various blockchains. The founder of Chinese blockchain project Neo launched Poly Network in partnership with Ontology and Switcheo.
The Poly Network team has since published this letter to the hacker.
Hackers have returned nearly half of the $600 million they stole in what’s likely to be one of the biggest cryptocurrency thefts ever.
The cybercriminals exploited a vulnerability in Poly Network, a platform that looks to connect different blockchains so that they can work together.
Poly Network disclosed the attack Tuesday and asked to establish communication with the hackers, urging them to “return the hacked assets.”
Leave a Reply