Harmony offered $1 million reward for recovering stolen funds

What’s new? The developers of Harmony, a Layer-one (L1) network, have offered a reward of $1 million for the return of $100 million in cryptocurrency stolen in the hack of Horizon bridge on June 24, as well as information on how the exploit took place. The project team added on Twitter that it would “advocate for no criminal charges” if the funds were returned.

We commit to a $1M bounty for the return of Horizon bridge funds and sharing exploit information. Contact us at [email protected] or ETH address 0xd6ddd996b2d5b7db22306654fd548ba2a58693ac. Harmony will advocate for no criminal charges when funds are returned.— Harmony 💙 (@harmonyprotocol) June 26, 2022

What is known about the hack? Harmony’s founder and CEO Stephen Tse also wrote on Twitter that there is “no evidence of smart contract code breach” or vulnerability on the platform. According to the head of the project, the team found evidence that the private keys had been compromised. This is what led to the hack of the Horizon cross-chain.

2/ Incident response has found no evidence of smart contract code breach. No evidence of any vulnerability on the Horizon platform was found. Our consensus layer of the Harmony blockchain remains secure.— stephen tse 💙 s.one 🌉 stse.eth (@stse) June 26, 2022

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

Horizon was subjected to an exploit 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.

In late April, hackers withdrew more than $80 million from the Rari Capital and Fei Protocol DeFi platforms. Fei offered the attackers to keep $10 million as a “reward” if the rest funds were returned.