If you won the lottery, would you turn down the money because you told yourself you were only in it for fun?
After pulling off one of the largest cryptocurrency heists ever, the hacker (or hackers) decided to return $600 million worth of assets to the victim, Poly Network, claiming to have only done this "for fun" and that it was "always the plan" to return the crypto.
But returning the assets is not as straight forward as you might think.
After learning of the hack, Poly Network pleaded for the culprit to return the stolen cryptocurrency and provided three digital currency wallets. The hacker obliged and quickly returned roughly $342 million of the funds to those wallets.
But that still left a couple hundred million dollars missing. Poly Network says that $268 million of assets is locked away in an account that will require passwords from both the company and the hacker to recover.
In one of the digital currency transactions, the hacker embedded this message:
"When _everyone_ is ready, we will provide the final key."
In a somewhat surprising turn of events, Poly Network offered the hacker a $500,000 bug bounty if they were to unlock the rest of the assets.
Tom Robinson, Chief Scientist and Co-Founder of Elliptic, shared this message from Poly Network to the hacker on Twitter:
In response to this offer from Poly Network, the hacker said they would not be accepting:
"The Poly did offer a bounty, but I have never responded to them. Instead, I will send all of their money back."
Robinson also shared some Q&A between the hacker and Poly Network:
For more information and updates on the situation, check Poly Network's Twitter feed, as well as Tom Robinson's.