Biggest crypto heist! Hackers steal $611 million from Poly Network; return some money after request

Poly Network has been hacked for $611 million in the largest DeFi hack to date. The Network tweeted on Tuesday that it was attacked on BinanceChain, Ethereum and Polygon. In an open letter, it urged the hackers to return the hacked assets. Poly Network is a decentralised-finance (DeFi) platform built to implement interoperability between multiple chains including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ontology, Binance Smart Chain, etc. It basically allows various blockchains to work with each other.

Ethereum seems to be the most hit crypto due to theft. The hacked assets included $273 million of Ethereum tokens, $253 million in tokens on Binance Smart Chain and $85 million in USDC on the Polygon network.

"We are sorry to announce that PolyNetwork was attacked on BinanceChain ethereum and Polygon," Poly Network tweeted on Tuesday.

"We call on miners of affected blockchain and crypto exchanges to blacklist tokens coming from the above addresses," it added.

Also read: Ethereum just underwent a major change - hence, the 25% jump in a week!

See the tweets below:

As an interesting update, the hackers have already begun to return some money. As per the latest tweet by Poly Network, so far, a total value of $4,772,297.675 assets have been returned by the hackers.

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Changpeng Zhao, CEO at the world's largest crypto exchanges Binance, in response to the world's biggest DeFi heist tweeted, "We are aware of the http://poly.network exploit that occurred today. While no one controls BSC (or ETH), we are coordinating with all our security partners to proactively help. There are no guarantees. We will do as much as we can."

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Poly Network, after preliminary investigation, located the cause of the vulnerability. It said the hacker exploited a vulnerability between contract calls, and that the exploit was not caused by the single keeper as rumoured.

Meanwhile, after a major tech upgrade, the world's second-largest, and seemingly the most hit cryptocurrency due to the stealing, Ethereum has gained more than 25 per cent in a week. Crypto analysts say the London Hard Fork update is the reason behind the surge in the cryptocurrency's value.

Also read: Cryptocurrency prices today: Bitcoin trades flat; Ethereum, Dogecoin & XRP rise up to 9%