Cryptocurrency platform loses $600m in 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 decentralised finance platform (DeFi), announced the hack on Twitter  and posted details of digital wallets to which it said the money was transferred, urging people to blacklist tokens from those addresses.

The value of the tokens in the wallets cited by Poly was just over $600 million at the time of the announcement, according to crypto trade publication The Block.

The heist appears to be one of the biggest ever in cryptocurrency markets, and compares with the $530 million in cryptocurrency stolen from Tokyo-based bitcoin exchange Coincheck in 2018.

Crypto exchange Mt. Gox, also based in Tokyo, collapsed in 2014 after losing half a billion dollars in bitcoin.

The latest attack comes as losses from theft, hacks and fraud related to decentralised finance hit an all-time high, raising the risk of both investing in the sector and of regulators looking to shake it down.

DeFi  refers to peer-to-peer cryptocurrency platforms that allow transactions without traditional gatekeepers such as banks or exchanges. Poly Network allows users to swap tokens across different blockchains.

“It is a massive hack ... as large as Mt. Gox,” said Bobby Ong, co-founder of crypto analytics website CoinGecko, although he noted the fallout had not yet hurt major crypto prices.

“This project is finished in my opinion. (It is) going to take a lot to regain confidence,” Ong said.

Poly did not immediately respond to a request on Wednesday for more detail about the incident. It was not immediately clear where the platform is based, or whether any law enforcement agency was investigating the heist.