Cross-Chain DeFi Site Poly Network Hacked; Hundreds of Millions Potentially Lost

Cross-chain decentralized finance (DeFi) platform Poly Network was attacked on Tuesday, with the alleged hacker draining roughly $600 million in crypto.

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.

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 (WBTC), wrapped ether (WETH) and shiba inu (SHIB), blockchain scanning platforms show.

“We call on miners of affected blockchain and crypto exchanges to blacklist tokens coming from the above addresses,” the Poly team tweeted.

The $600 million figure would place the Poly Network hack among the largest in crypto history.

Tether froze approximately $33 million in relation to the hack, Tether CTO Paul Adroino tweeted.

About one hour after Poly announced the hack on Twitter, the hacker tried to move assets including USDT through the Ethereum address into liquidity pool Curve.fi, records show. The transaction was rejected.

Meanwhile, close to $100 million has been moved out of the Binance Smart Chain address in the past 30 minutes and deposited into liquidity pool Ellipsis Finance.

The Poly team could not be reached for comment at the time of publication.

Poly Network was the second Chinese interoperability protocol to be featured on the government-backed Blockchain-based Service Network.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

UPDATE (Aug. 10, 14:30 UTC): Adds information about the wallet addresses and Tether’s move.

UPDATE (Aug. 10, 14:54 UTC): Adds information about funds moving out of the Binance Smart Chain address.