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Poly Network suffers one of the biggest hacks in crypto history
- Blockchain interoperability platform Poly Network has suffered a massive hack, with current estimates pointing to over $600 million in losses.
- On their official Twitter account, the Poly Network team disclosed some of the Ethereum, Polygon and Binance Smart Chain addresses that are allegedly controlled by the attacker. At the time of writing, the attacker’s Ethereum address alone holds $90M worth of ETH, $96M worth of DAI and $46M and $33M worth of WBTC and USDT, respectively.
- At the moment, the mechanism exploited by the attacker is unknown, as the hack is still relatively fresh. Poly Network allows users to “move” tokens between different blockchains, and supports popular platforms like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Polygon, Neo, and others.
- The Poly Network team is calling on cryptocurrency exchanges, stablecoin issuers, DeFi protocol teams, and even miners to blacklist transfers originating from the addresses controlled by the hacker. The team also said that it intends to take legal action against the attacker.
- While it would be impossible to completely stop the attacker from moving the assets, centralized players like exchanges and stablecoin issuers could limit some of the damage. For example, Tether CTO Paolo Ardoino says that the company has frozen the 33 million USDT tokens held by the attacker on their Ethereum address.
. @Tether_to just froze ~33M $USDt on 0xC8a65Fadf0e0dDAf421F28FEAb69Bf6E2E589963 as part of the #PolyNetwork hack https://t.co/EviPTAkQJD
— Paolo Ardoino (@paoloardoino) August 10, 2021 - Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao also commented on the attack. While he started his message off by noting that “no one controls BSC”, CZ added that Binance will do as much as they can to help out with the situation faced by Poly Network.
- If the current estimate of over $600 million in losses is accurate, the Poly Network hack would be the biggest cryptocurrency heist of all time. Currently, this unfortunate record is held by Japanese cryptocurrency exchange CoinCheck, which lost over $500 million worth of crypto assets in a January 2018 hack.