Decentralized finance company Poly Network has offered a $500,000 bug bounty to the hacker who stole more than $600 million worth of cryptocurrency from it earlier this week, Reuters reported today. The company has also started the process of returning the stolen assets to their rightful owners and improving the security of its platform following the high-profile theft.
The bounty was offered after the hacker, whom Poly Network has dubbed "Mr. White Hat," started to return the stolen funds shortly after the hack was completed. Mr. White Hat then compared themselves to Batman in messages sent to Poly Network and the decentralized finance community in public transaction logs.
Poly Network said this morning that "approximately $238 million is currently being transferred to the 3/4 multi-signature wallet, while we still wait for Mr. White Hat to provide his final key authorization," and that another $33 million USDT was frozen while the company worked with Tether to enable the funds' safe return.
The company also outlined its planned response to this hack:
With the aim of ensuring complete, safe, and smooth asset recovery, we would like to briefly share #PolyNetwork 's roadmap for resuming operations and fully recovering user assets in the next phase.August 13, 2021
Its response will likely be affected somewhat by additional scrutiny brought on by this high profile hack, its users' concerns about the platform's safety and attempts to take advantage over the hype surrounding the company with various scams. (All of which are common after well-known hacks and not exclusive to Poly Network.)
Poly Network acknowledged that it's been subject to a lot of scrutiny as a result of this hack—and that it's not the only one being judged.
"This incident does not just concern all the #PolyNetwork users, community participants, and partners," it said, "but also greatly affects the confidence of society at large in the crypto industry."
