The hacker known as ‘Mr. White Hat’ returned the remaining $141 million, calling the theft ‘my efforts to contribute to the security of the poly project.
That early morning post also announced that it had begun restoring its cross-chain bridges, frozen after the hack, with 54 opened at that time.
The New Advisor?
In that Ethereum transaction message, “Mr. White Hat” apologized for “wild or mad behaviors,” saying the hack and its aftermath “must be one of the most wild adventures in our lives.”
The message was signed “Your chief security advisor,” suggesting that M. White Hat has taken Poly Network up on its offer to take up that new post.
In the August 23 message, Mr. White Hat said that he had accepted it — along with donations he solicited after beginning the return process — and sent it to Poly Network’s shared multisig wallet.
“[D]distributing the extra assets to the ‘survivors’ would be the last request from this man,” he said.
The hack and its aftermath “must be a serious lesson to many of us, or even the whole defi community,” he said, adding that he hoped his behavior and philosophy would inspire bad actors.
The return process hit a bump on August 18, when Mr. White Hat halted the return process because of the Tether freeze.
On August 23, he repeated that, saying that in his “selfish view, the story is tainted by the locked usdt.”
That could have been “ a perfect example of building trust between anonymous ‘adversaries’ by leveraging the power of smart contract, if we had any chance to deal with the usdt in a not centralized way.”