Key takeaways:
- In a message sent to the hacker responsible for the $200 million exploit, Mixin Network offered a $20 million bug bounty to recover the lost funds.
- Mixin’s founder stated that the business would compensate impacted users with the remaining sum being returned in bond tokens.
In a message sent on September 23 to the hacker responsible for the $200 million exploit, Mixin Network, a decentralized cross-chain protocol, offered a $20 million bug bounty to recover the lost funds.
Since most of the funds stolen were user assets, Mixin Network demanded that the exploiter repay the funds in an encrypted message with the exploiter transaction. The company stated:
“Most of our platform assets were users, and we hope you can refund them. You can keep $20M of the assets as a BUG Bounty Reward for the BUG.”
On September 25, Mixin Network said that the exploit had been discovered. According to Mixin Network, the exploiters had broken into a cloud service provider and stolen over $200 million worth of platform assets.
Mixin’s founder, Feng Xiaodong, stated that the business would compensate impacted users up to a “maximum of 50%,” with the remaining sum being returned in bond tokens that the company would later repurchase with its earnings.
Although Mixin has not yet provided all the information regarding what caused the exploit, an on-chain analytic tool has drawn attention to a history of the hacker’s communications with the Mixin Network. Mixin sent 5 Ether to the hacker-related address 0x1795 in 2022.
Cross-chain protocols in the decentralized finance (DeFi) field have been the target of some of the greatest vulnerabilities in cryptocurrency history; however, it is still unclear how the exploiters were able to steal $200 million worth of assets through a data breach.
According to one research, more than half of all DeFi attacks target cross-chain protocols and have cost users more than $2.5 billion.
Cross-chain protocols facilitate communication between several chains and enable users to transfer assets from one blockchain to another. This makes these cross-chain protocols vulnerable to such vulnerabilities since they frequently store a sizable number of assets from other chains.
