Harmony network developers announced collaboration with the FBI to investigate the hack

What’s new? The developers of Harmony's Layer 1 (L1) network said they are collaborating with the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as well as “two highly reputable blockchain tracing and analysis partners” as part of the investigation into the Horizon Bridge hack on June 24, which resulted in the theft of $100 million in cryptocurrency. The project team said on Twitter that hackers began transferring the stolen funds through the Tornado Cash transaction mixer.

1/ We are aware the hacker has begun to move funds through Tornado Cash. The team is working with two highly reputable blockchain tracing and analysis partners, and collaborating with the FBI as part of an investigation into this criminal act. 🧵— Harmony 💙 (@harmonyprotocol) June 28, 2022

What else did project representatives say? The Harmony team, without going into detail, reported that they were working on securing the project's ecosystem to protect users and partners. The developers of the network said they would provide the community with all possible information, with the exception of data that could harm the course of the investigation.

Representatives of the project are still willing to negotiate with the hackers, and they intend to continue to investigate until the situation is resolved or the stolen funds are returned. Earlier, they offered the hackers a reward of $1 million for the return of the remaining funds and information about the exploit. In that case, the team promised to “advocate for no criminal charges.”

On June 28, analytics company PeckShield reported that the hackers had transferred the last 6,000 ETH ($7,3 million) stolen as a result of the Horizon cross-chain hack.

#PeckShieldAlert Last batch of ~6k $ETH (~$7.1m) into @TornadoCash from @harmonyprotocol exploitersIntermediary address: 0x8a...c3f4 pic.twitter.com/Xpigp7jCWs— PeckShieldAlert (@PeckShieldAlert) June 28, 2022

The Harmony network is built in the Ethereum ecosystem and provides low fees and increased transaction speed. Horizon cross-chain bridge provides a link between Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain and Bitcoin networks.

Horizon was exploited on the morning of June 24. Among the stolen funds were about $10 million in USDT stablecoins, $41 million in USDC, $5,5 million in BUSD and about $6 million in DAI. The hackers also withdrew 43 wETH, 592 wBTC and 40 000 SUSHI tokens. After the hack, they exchanged the cryptocurrency on the Uniswap exchange.