Last week a hacker made off with over $600 million in crypto assets after successfully breaching decentralised finance platform Poly Network.
As you might recall the story took a surprising turn when the hacker started returning the stolen assets to Poly Network. There is still some $200 million in assets that have not been returned to the platform yet according to CNBC.
“We have made constant efforts to establish an understanding with Mr. White Hat and genuinely hope that Mr. White Hat will transfer the private keys as soon as possible so that we can return full asset control back to the users at the earliest,” Poly Network wrote in a blog post.
The DeFi platform goes on to say that it is working internally and with other organisations to secure its systems so that something like this doesn’t happen again. The company has detailed its plans to secure its service here.
In addition, Poly Network has started offering bounties for bugs via Immunefi.
However, things took an even more surprising turn yesterday when Poly Network straight up offered the hacker a position as the firm’s Chief Security Officer.
“We are also counting on more experts like Mr. White Hat to be involved in the future development of Poly Network since we believe that we share the vision to build a secure and robust distributed system. Also, to extend our thanks and encourage Mr. White Hat to continue contributing to security advancement in the blockchain world together with Poly Network, we cordially invite Mr. White Hat to be the Chief Security Advisor of Poly Network,” the firm wrote.
“Again, it is important to reiterate that Poly Network has no intention of holding Mr. White Hat legally responsible, as we are confident that Mr. White Hat will promptly return full control of the assets to Poly Network and its users. As we have stated in previous announcements and encrypted messages that have been made public, we are grateful for Mr. White Hat’s outstanding contribution to Poly Network’s security enhancements,” Poly Network added.
The firm says it went so far as to offer the hacker a $500 000 bounty which it says they declined. Despite the hacker turning down the offer Poly Network says it has transferred the funds to a wallet address used by the hacker “for him to use it at his own discretion for the cause of cybersecurity and supporting more projects and individuals”.
This incident has just become more and more strange since it started and we suspect it’s not entirely over just yet.
[Image – CC 0 Pixabay]
