Tether Releases Final $33 Million in USDT After Poly Network “Mr. White Hat” Returns Remaining Funds
Cross-chain decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Poly Network announced yesterday in a blog post that it has recovered all of its assets following the August exploit. The protocol, which suffered the largest DeFi hack in history on August 10, had funds stolen across Ethereum, Polygon and Binance Smart Chain, totaling approximately $611 million.
After the attack, Poly Network published the blockchain addresses used by the attacker and urged the cryptocurrency community to blacklist tokens moving from those wallets. Tether responded quickly and froze about 33 million USDT in an ETH address.
The attacker, whom Poly Network later dubbed “Mr. White Hat,” said the exploit was carried out “for fun” during an AMA thread. By August 12, Mr. White Hat had returned $342 million of the stolen assets, and the following week Poly Network publicly offered him the role of chief security advisor.
On Monday, the protocol revealed that the attacker had shared the private key to a multisignature wallet holding the remaining $141 million, effectively restoring control of those assets. That meant Poly Network had recovered all stolen funds except for the USDT that Tether had frozen. Poly Network said it had been in close contact with the stablecoin issuer and was following Tether’s standard procedure for unfreezing funds.
Yesterday’s update confirmed the process was complete: Tether released 33,431,200 USDT to Poly Network’s designated multisig address, returning the final portion of the assets to their legitimate owners.
After working closely with #PolyNetwork through the strict protocols to unfreeze the funds involved in the recent hack, Tether can confirm that the funds have been released today to the legitimate owners. 1/3
— Tether (@Tether_to) August 25, 2021
Recovery of the funds represented the fourth phase of Poly Network’s restoration plan. The protocol is now moving into the fifth phase, which focuses on resuming services. Poly Bridge has restored cross-chain functionality for 59 assets so far, and additional services will be reopened gradually for security reasons.
Poly Network also launched a $500,000 bug bounty on the Immunefi platform to encourage security researchers to identify any remaining vulnerabilities in the protocol.
“Poly Network would like to thank Tether for the prompt assistance from the beginning of the incident,” the blog post read, “and we appreciate our users’ support and patience while they waited for their assets to be returned.”