A cryptocurrency platform has lost an estimated $600 million in digital tokens after one of the sector’s biggest ever hacking attacks, Reuters reported.
Poly Network, a decentralised finance platform (DeFi), announced the hack on Twitter and posted details of digital wallets to which it said the money was transferred, urging people to blacklist tokens from those addresses.
The value of the tokens in the wallets cited by the platform was just over $600 million at the time of the announcement, according to crypto trade publication The Block.
Poly Network did not respond to a request for more detail about the incident. It was not clear where the platform is based, or whether any law enforcement agency was investigating the heist.
The platform tweeted it planned to take legal action and urged the hackers to return the stolen funds to several of its digital addresses.
The plea looked to be gaining some traction, with around $2 million in stolen tokens returned by Wednesday morning, according to public blockchain records and crypto tracking firm Elliptic.
The theft appeared to be one of the biggest ever in cryptocurrency markets and compares with the $530 million in digital coins stolen from Tokyo-based exchange Coincheck in 2018.
The Mt. Gox exchange, also based in Tokyo, collapsed in 2014 after losing half a billion dollars in bitcoin.
DeFi refers to peer-to-peer cryptocurrency platforms that allow transactions without traditional gatekeepers such as banks or exchanges. Poly Network allows users to swap tokens across different blockchains.
“It is a massive hack … as large as Mt. Gox,” said Bobby Ong, co-founder of crypto analytics website CoinGecko, although he noted the fallout had not yet hurt major crypto prices.
The retrieval of some of the tokens underscored the difficulties of laundering large amounts of stolen crypto, said Tom Robinson, Elliptic co-founder.
