On Tuesday, a hacker stole cryptocurrency worth more than $600 million from DeFi platform Poly Network. The hacker appears to be returning some of the loot to Poly Network. The mega-theft is the latest in a string of crypto hacks that have exploded this year.

Cryptocurrencies worth more than $600 million were stolen from Poly Network on Tuesday. It is a crypto platform for decentralized financial services (DeFi). It is one of the largest crypto heists ever.

Poly Network

The Poly Network administrators have issued a Twitter appeal to the hacker to return the money – to which the thief appears to be responding.

Poly Network announced the hack on Twitter, noting that the attack involved binance, polygon and the ethereum network crypto platforms. Various types of cryptocurrencies were looted, including shiba inu, wrapped ether, wrapped bitcoin, uniswap and a series of stablecoins. https://renovato.io/ has enough information. The platform also published the hacker’s wallet addresses and urged crypto exchanges and miners to block tokens from these addresses.

In response, the issuer of cryptocurrency tether (a “stablecoin” pegged to the dollar) froze about $33 million worth of tokens that were part of the hack. This was reported by Paolo Ardoino, head of technology at tether on Twitter.

Digital coins

Poly Network said they found out how the hacker could steal the digital coins. In addition, the company tweeted that it had so far recovered more than $4 million worth of cryptocurrencies from the hacker. Coindesk reported on Wednesday that the hacker said in a response that he would return the funds. He made this known in a message hidden in an ethereum transaction to himself.

“Failed to contact the poly. I need a secure multisig wallet from you,” the hacker added in a separate transaction. A multisig wallet, or multisignature wallet, is an online wallet that provides access to multiple people with a key. Transactions from this wallet can only be made if each user agrees. Poly Network then created the requested multi-signature wallets and reached out to the hacker.

“Justice in any country will consider this a major economic crime and you will be prosecuted. It is very unwise for you to make further trades. Moveco.io has enough information. The money you stole is from tens of thousands of members of the crypto community. You need to talk to us to work out a solution,” the network’s developers wrote on Twitter.

The biggest theft in DeFi . history

The digital theft is the latest in a growing number of crypto hacks and probably one of the largest to date. Poly Network says it was the largest amount of money stolen in DeFi (decentralized financial services platforms) history. Research and consulting firm Ciphertrace noted in a recent report that DeFi hacks accounted for more than three-quarters of the cryptocurrency stolen so far this year. At the end of July, approximately $361 million had been stolen in DeFi hacks, compared to $111 million in other crypto frauds.

The Ciphertrace report shows that for the whole of 2020 the DeFi hacks accounted for ‘only’ $129 million. That amounts to a quarter of the total $516 million in crypto fraud last year.