Hacker Pulls Off A Massive $324M Crypto Heist Then Gets Offered A $10M Reward

In one of the largest DeFi hacks ever, a hacker is being offered a $10 million bug bounty for the return of stolen money. Wormhole, one of the biggest bridges between Solana and other blockchains, was hacked for approximately $324 million.

Cryptocurrency is one of the hottest assets going right now. So hot that Spain's National Police recently raided what they thought was an indoor marijuana plantation, only to find that it was a cryptocurrency mining farm that was stealing electricity. And it now appears that someone who wasn't into the whole mining for crypto decided to take an estimated $324 million in cryptocurrency the old fashioned way...by hacking.

Wormhole confirmed on its Twitter account yesterday, February 2nd, that it was exploited for 120K wETH, or approximately $324 million at the time. Wormhole reported, "ETH will be added over the next hours to ensure wETH is backed 1:1. More details to come shortly. We are working to get the network back up quickly."

The heist is one of the largest cryptocurrency thefts of all time and is the second largest from a DeFi service, according to blockchain analysis firm Elliptic. DeFi is a financial tool that uses blockchain technology to bypass the use of middleman institutions. The platform furnishes a connection that allows for the transfer of cryptocurrency between different decentralized-finance blockchain networks.

"The exploit appears to have allowed the attacker to mint 120,000 wrapped ETH on the Solana blockchain, 93,750 ETH of which was then transferred to the Ethereum blockchain," Elliptic stated in a blog post.

Yesterday evening, Tom Robinson, Chief Scientist and Co-founder of Elliptic, tweeted, "Wormhole has offered the attacker a $10 million 'bounty' to return the funds." The tweet included a snippet from "Wormhole Deployer", that said it noticed the hacker(s) were able to exploit the Solana VAA verification and mint tokens. It offered the thieves what it called a "whitehat agreement", which included the $10 million bug bounty for exploit details and the return of the stolen funds.

As of right now, there is no indication that anyone has contacted Wormhole in regard to taking responsibility to the theft.