Largest crypto heist: Platform loses $600mn

HONG KONG/SINGAPORE/LONDON: A cryptocurrency platform has lost an estimated $600 million in digital tokens after one of the sector’s biggest ever hacking attacks, according to details of the heist which emerged on Wednesday.

Poly Network, a decentralised finance platform (DeFi), announced the hack on Twitter and posted details of digital wallets to which it said the money was transferred, urging people to blacklist tokens from those addresses. The value of the tokens in the wallets cited by the platform was just over $600 million at the time of the announcement, according to crypto trade publication The Block.

Poly Network did not immediately respond to a request for more detail about the incident. It was not immediately clear where the platform is based, or whether any law enforcement agency was investigating the heist.

The platform tweeted it planned to take legal action and urged the hackers to return the stolen funds to several of its digital addresses. The plea looked to be gaining some traction, with around $2 million in stolen tokens returned by Wednesday morning, according to public blockchain records and crypto tracking firm Elliptic.

The theft appeared to be one of the biggest ever in cryptocurrency markets and compares with the $530 million in digital coins stolen from Tokyo-based exchange Coincheck in 2018. The Mt. Gox exchange, also based in Tokyo, collapsed in 2014 after losing half a billion dollars in bitcoin.

The latest attack comes as losses from theft, hacks and fraud related to decentralised finance hit an all-time high, raising the risk of both investing in the sector and of regulators looking to shake it down. DeFi refers to peer-to-peer cryptocurrency platforms that allow transactions without traditional gatekeepers such as banks or exchanges. Poly Network allows users to swap tokens across different blockchains.