Over $600m In Crypto Stolen As Cross-Chain DeFi Site, Poly Network, Gets Hacked

The Poly Network protocol was hacked and lost $611 million, setting a record for the biggest attack on the decentralized finance (DeFi) network to date.

Poly Network, a protocol launched by the founder of Chinese blockchain project Neo, operates on the Binance Smart Chain, Ethereum and Polygon blockchains. Tuesday’s attack struck each chain consecutively, with the Poly team identifying three addresses where stolen assets were transferred.

"We are sorry to announce that #PolyNetwork was attacked on @BinanceChain @ethereum and @0xPolygon," tweeted Poly Network today, addin "We call on miners of affected blockchain and crypto exchanges to blacklist tokens coming from the above addresses."

At the time that Poly tweeted news of the attack, the three addresses collectively held more than $600 million in different cryptocurrencies, including USDC, wrapped bitcoin, wrapped ether and Shiba Inu, blockchain scanning platforms show.

The company made a rather unsettling response when it issued a statement addressing the hacker, requesting that they talk things out.

DeFi-related hacks made up 76% of major hack volume in the crypto arena this year as of the end of July, CipherTrace’s “Cryptocurrency Crime and Anti-Money Laundering Report” concluded.

Soon after the hack, Tether, the company behind the world’s third-largest cryptocurrency and largest stablecoin by market capitalization, froze roughly $33 million in USDT tokens associated with the alleged hacker’s wallet address, according to its chief technology officer.