Harmony Trying To Win Back Stolen Funds, CEO Explains Attack

Harmony Protocol has offered a $1 million bounty for a return of stolen funds and any information regarding the hack that attacked the protocol last week. 

Fund Return Request Promises No Charges

The Harmony team has offered the bounty for the return of the $100 million worth of altcoins stolen from the hack of the Horizon bridge last week, claiming that it will not press any criminal charges against the perpetrators. The call is also for sharing further information on how the hack happened. So far, the team has been able to deduce that the hackers were able to compromise private keys and gain access.

The team tweeted,

“We commit to a $1M bounty for the return of Horizon bridge funds and sharing exploit information…Harmony will advocate for no criminal charges when funds are returned.”

The hack targeted altcoins like Frax, Wrapped ETH, Aave, SushiSwap, Frax Share, AAG, Binance USD, Dai, Tether, Wrapped BTC, and USD Coin. Tokens worth $100 million were channeled into one wallet, and swapped for ETH on Uniswap. 

Crypto Community Calls Out Lowball Offer

However, the disproportionate bounty amount has taken the crypto community by surprise. The consensus among the masses is that the offered $1 million is just a drop in the ocean for the return of a $100 loot amount. The Twitter community believes that the offer amount should be much higher to be seriously considered. 

Some Twitter users responded to the announcement with – 

“Didnt they take about 100 million? What the h*ll is 1 million gonna do?”

“Really? Only 1M out of 100M? I feel like you gotta offer at least 8M to be taken seriously.”

“I doubt 1m will suffice the hacker, might need to up for and hope they answer.”

How Was The Bridge Hacked? 

The Harmony bridge has previously been called out for the lack of stability offered by its multisigs. Reportedly only two of the four multisigs secured the bridge. Therefore two signees could easily gain access to control the funds. 

However, the Founder and CEO of Harmony Protocol, Stephen Tse has clarified that neither have any vulnerabilities been discovered on the Horizon platform, nor was there any hint of a smart contract breach. According to Tse’s tweets, the root of the vulnerability lay with some compromised private keys. 

He tweeted, 

“Our consensus layer of the Harmony blockchain remains secure…The team has found evidence that private keys were compromised, leading to the breach of our Horizon bridge. Funds were stolen from the Ethereum side of the bridge.”

He explained that despite being double encrypted, the private keys were accessed and then decrypted by the attacker, who used them to authorize the malicious transactions.

Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.