Polynetwork, a platform that helps link blockchains together, says that its Twitter plea to hackers to return the $610 million in recently stolen cryptocurrency has begun to pay off, with several million already handed back.
Yesterday, Polynetwork took the unusual step of tweeting a message aimed at hackers, saying that the "amount of money you hacked is the biggest one in the defi history".
Urging the money's return, the firm continued: "The money you stole are from tens of thousands of crypto community members, hence the people".
The crooks stole around $257 million of Ethereum, $252 million of Binance coin and $85 million in USDC tokens, sending the funds to three addresses, according to security outfit SlowMist, which outlined details of the attack in a Medium post.
Polynetwork posted addresses on Twitter for the hackers to return the funds. The move appears to have had some success - by around 1:00pm BST on Wednesday, Polynetwork said that around $4.8 million had been returned.
By close of play the exchange was reporting that $260 million had been returned.
SlowMist says that it has: “grasped the attacker’s mailbox, IP, and device fingerprints” and is “tracking possible identity clues related to the Poly Network attacker".
Meanwhile, $33 million taken in Tether has been frozen by Bitfinex and Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao says that his firm is "coordinating with security partners," although he stresses "there are no guarantees.