Mixin Community, a decentralized cross-chain protocol, in a message to the hacker behind the $200 million exploit on Sept. 23, has provided a $20-million bug bounty for the return of the remaining funds.

Mixin Community encrypted the message with the exploiter transaction, requesting the exploiter to return the funds as nearly all of the stolen funds had been consumer belongings.

“Most of our platform belongings had been customers, and we hope you may refund them. You possibly can hold $20M of the belongings as a BUG Bounty Reward for the BUG.”

Mixin Community confirmed the exploit on Sept. 25, claiming the exploiters managed to breach a third-party cloud service supplier, which resulted within the theft of practically $200 million of belongings from the platform.

Feng Xiaodong, founding father of Mixin, stated on the time that the corporate would reimburse affected customers as much as a “most of fifty%,” with the remaining quantity being handed again in bond tokens that the enterprise would then repurchase with its earnings.

Mixin is but to supply full particulars about what led to the exploit, however an on-chain analytic platform highlighted a historical past of the hacker’s interactions with Mixin Community. The hacker-associated handle 0x1795 obtained 5 Ether (ETH) from Mixin in 2022.

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Whereas it’s nonetheless unclear how the exploiters managed to steal $200 million value of belongings by an information breach, cross-chain protocols within the decentralized finance (DeFi) house have been the goal of among the largest exploits in crypto historical past. One report signifies greater than half of all DeFi exploits happen on cross-chain protocols, which have resulted in losses of over $2.5 billion.

Bridge exploits account for greater than 50% of DeFi losses. Supply: Token Terminal

Cross-chain protocols assist with interoperability between totally different chains, permitting customers to ship belongings from one blockchain to a different. Thus, these cross-chain protocols typically maintain a major quantity of belongings from a number of chains, making them susceptible to such exploits.

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