In the newest twist to the Poly Network crypto hack, the perpetrator who returned a lot of the $611 million in stolen digital tokens is being supplied a $500,000 reward. The prize is a bug bounty to be exact, an incentive supplied by tech organizations to those that report safety vulnerabilities. In a press release, Poly Network referred to the wrongdoer as a “white hat” in reference to his standing as an moral hacker. The decentralized finance platform thanked the hacker for “helping to improve” its safety, however didn’t point out how it will pay the reward or whether or not it had been accepted. 

An individual claiming to be the perpetrator confirmed that Poly Network had supplied him a $500,000 bounty to return the stolen belongings and promised that he wouldn’t be held accountable for the incident, based on messages shared on Twitter by Tom Robinson, the chief scientist and co-founder of Elliptic, a crypto monitoring agency. 

Poly Network connects totally different blockchains, the ledgers upon which cryptocurrencies are based mostly, to allow them to work collectively. The firm revealed on Tuesday that it was the sufferer of an enormous crypto heist that noticed a hacker make away with about $611 million in Ethereum, Shiba Inu and different digital currencies. 

On Wednesday, the hacker started returning the stolen funds after claiming they had been able to give up. Poly Network stated on Friday that the hacker had repaid $340 million price of belongings right into a digital pockets. All that is still is the $33 million in tether frozen by the corporate behind the cryptocurrency.

It’s nonetheless unclear what prompted the hacker to backtrack. Some consultants consider that they might have discovered it laborious to launder and money out the massive quantity of stolen crypto. While others counsel that the hacker was afraid of being uncovered and prosecuted after researchers found a trove of figuring out information, together with an e mail and IP deal with. More broadly, the weird collection of occasions additional illustrates the pitfalls concerned with cryptocurrency, an unregulated area the place hacks and scams are rife.