The biggest crypto hack ever, more than 600 million USD stolen

Currently, the PolyNetwork protocol is calling on miners to stop trading with tokens transferred to the hacker's wallet.

In the biggest ever DeFi application hack, interoperable protocol Poly Network is the latest victim of an attack with a record stolen amount of more than $611 million. The hackers then quickly transferred those assets to addresses on Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, and Polygon.

Earlier, Poly Network announced on its Twitter channel that the platform encountered a serious security breach. Accordingly, the wallet address that the hacker transferred money to for custody has been confirmed and the project proposes that the exchange supports temporarily blocking this address.

"We regret to announce that #PolyNetwork has just been hacked on the @BinanceChain @Ethereum and @0xPolygon chains." Poly Network's tweet said. “We urge miners of the affected blockchain and cryptocurrency exchanges to blacklist tokens from the aforementioned addresses.”

Poly Network is a protocol that allows token swaps between blockchains, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Ontology. It was founded by an alliance between the groups that have created blockchain-linked platforms, including Neo, Ontology, and Switcheo.

The development team pointed out that assets stored on Binance Smart Chain, Ethereum, and Polygon have been moved to other addresses belonging to this group of hackers. Of that, about $273 million was sent to Ethereum, another $253 million was sent via Binance Smart Chain, and $85 million was sent to the Polygon network.

Since being notified of the theft, Tether has blocked a USDT transaction for Ethereum stolen in the last attack – the token is estimated to be worth around $33 million. This also means that they will no longer be transferable. (USDT is a stablecoin with a value of approximately 1 USD and can be frozen by the company operating it, similar to other stablecoins like USDC).

Besides, some people think that O3 swap, a trading platform built on Poly Network's infrastructure, has also suffered relative damage.

“O3's cross-chain swap feature is currently paused due to some Poly Network related issues. Non-cross-chain related features will still be rolled out normally.”

Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao also commented on the hack, claiming that the company is coordinating with its security partners. With a total loss of up to 611 million USD, it can be said that this is the largest DeFi hack to date. And unfortunately, this "record" was awarded to Poly Network, a project that is highly expected to lay the foundation for cross-chain transactions.

According to Igor Igamberdiev of The Block Research, the root cause of the attack was a problem with encryption - something that doesn't happen often. It is possible that this incident is similar to the previous Anyswap mining attack, with $7.9 million stolen after a hacker was able to reverse engineer the private key.