$600m in tokens stolen in massive cyberheist

A cryptocurrency platform has lost an estimated $600 million in digital tokens after one of the sector's biggest ever hacking attacks, according to details of the heist which emerged on Wednesday.

Poly Network, a decentralized finance platform, or DeFi, announced the hack on social media and posted details of digital wallets to which it said the money was transferred, urging people to blacklist tokens from those addresses.

Poly Network claims to be able to make different blockchains work with one another without the need for brokerages and exchanges, saving time and money. But in a tweet, it addressed the hackers, saying "the amount of money you hacked is the biggest in Defihistory", and pleading for them to "return the hacked assets".

The plea looked to be gaining some traction, with $2 million in stolen tokens returned by Wednesday morning, Reuters reported.

The latest attack came as losses from theft, hacks and fraud related to decentralized finance hit an all-time high, raising the risk of both investing in the sector and of regulators moving in.

Record losses

The theft appeared to be one of the biggest in cryptocurrency markets and compares with the $530 million in digital coins stolen from Tokyo-based exchange Coincheck in 2018.The Mt Gox exchange, also based in Tokyo, collapsed in 2014 after losing half a billion dollars in bitcoin.

Analysts at security company Slow-Mist said a figure in excess of $610 million was taken and had been transferred to three different addresses, prompting Poly Network to put out an appeal to cryptocurrency exchanges to "blacklist" tokens coming from addresses linked to the hackers.

The Financial Times reports that stablecoin company Tether has frozen around $33 million worth of its tokens that were taken, and it is also believed that a significant amount was taken in USD Coin, operated by payments service company Circle.

Cybersecurity expert Jake Moore said the heist was not like a traditional bank robbery.

"Money stolen which was stored in digital ledgers is taken from individual accounts, and this is what worries those choosing to store their money in these locations," he said.

The Poly Network hack comes hot on the heels of a report issued earlier this week by research company CipherTrace, highlighting that in the first seven months of the year, losses to fraud in the Defisector had reached a record figure of $474 million. But this one hack alone far surpasses that total for more than half a year.

"It's is a massive hack ... as large as Mt Gox," said Bobby Ong, cofounder of the website CoinGecko. "The project is finished, in my opinion. (It is) going to take a lot to regain confidence."

Agencies via Xinhua contributed to this story.