The Layer 1 Blockchain Project Team Harmony has offered a reward equal to just 1% of the $100 million in cryptocurrency stolen in the Horizon Bridge hack last week.
harmony tweeted on June 26 that the team had agreed to pay $1 million for the return of funds that were stolen from the Horizon Bridge on June 23. He added: “Harmony will advocate that no criminal charges be filed when the funds are 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
We are committed to offering a $1 million reward for the return of Horizon Brigde funds and sharing information about the exploit. Contact us at [email protected] or at the ETH address 0xd6ddd996b2d5b7db22306654fd548ba2a58693ac. Harmony will advocate that there be no criminal charges when the funds are returned.
Nevertheless, Concerns have been raised that the modest reward sum may not be enough to incentivize the attacker to return the funds.
The Horizon Bridge is a token bridge between the Harmony blockchain and the Ethereum network, Binance chain, and Bitcoin. The Bitcoin bridge was not affected in this exploit.
Compared to other high-profile exploits this year, Harmony’s bounty offer is low. The $10 million offered to the Rari Fuse attacker in May was 12.5% of the total stolen. The Beanstalk Finance team offered USD 7.6 million, which was 10% of the total exploited of the protocol in April.
Harmony’s reward offer is so low that crypto trader known on Twitter as Degen Spartan called it an “insulting amount.”He added: “Imagine losing 100 million and accepting a 1% reward. These people are just doing performance art to mitigate legal liability.”
1M?
insulting amount, gfy https://t.co/TgZ0gDOC43
— 찌 G 跻 じ Goblin of the (@DegenSpartan) June 26, 2022
Only 1 million dollars? It’s an insulting amount.
In an incident response update on the Horizon Bridge hack on June 25, Harmony founder Stephen Tse tweeted that the hack was not the result of a smart contract code breach, but rather that the team found evidence that private keys were compromised, leading to the bridge breach.
1/ An incident response update on the Horizon bridge hack
Confidentiality is key to maintain integrity as part of this ongoing investigation. The omission of specific details is to protect sensitive data in the interest of our community.
— stephen tse s.one stse.eth (@stse) June 26, 2022
1/ An incident response update on the Horizon Bridge hack. Confidentiality is key to maintaining integrity as part of this ongoing investigation. The omission of specific details is to protect sensitive data in the interest of our community.
Tse said that the Ethereum side of the bridge had migrated “to a 4-5 multisig since the incident.” The multisig wallet vulnerability requiring only two out of five signers was raised by a community member in April, but the issue was not addressed by the Harmony team until now.
A multisig wallet is a cryptocurrency wallet that requires multiple key holders to approve a transaction. These wallets are commonly used in cryptocurrency projects.
At the time of this writing, the Horizon Bridge hacker has not moved the stolen funds to Tornado Cash, an Ether (ETH) mixer, or any other anonymizer.
Hope is not lost for Harmony, as your reward of USD 1 million is not the smallest proportional to the amount of lost funds. In 2021, the Poly Network interoperability platform was hacked for $610 million. The team’s reward offer of $500,000 was 0.08% of the total stolen. The offer was rejected, but luckily the funds were returned anyway.
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