Mixin Network hopes to recover the stolen assets by issuing a bug bounty.
Mixin Network has proposed a $20 million reward to the person responsible for a recent heist that drained nearly $200 million from the decentralized platform.
By encrypting a message within the transaction, Mixin Network urged the malicious actor to give back the vast majority of the stolen assets, highlighting that these were user holdings.
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Shortly after publicly confirming the breach on September 25th, Mixin Network initiated a dialogue with the hacker by encrypting a message attached to the transaction. In particular, the statement read:
The majority of these assets belong to our platform users. We urge you to return them. You may retain $20 million as a bug bounty reward.
While details around the breach remain sparse, Feng Xiaodong, the founder of Mixin Network, assured that affected users would be partially reimbursed. He stated that the company would refund users up to a "maximum of 50%," with the remainder to be paid back in the form of bond tokens, which the company will repurchase over time.
What is interesting about this exploit is that, in 2022, the hacker's address previously received 5 Ether (ETH) from Mixin Networks.
Significantly, this exploit adds to the growing list of cyber heists targeted at cross-chain protocols within the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem. A report suggested that more than half of all DeFi-related security breaches have targeted these types of platforms, resulting in more than $2.5 billion in total losses.
Mixin Network's move to offer a $20 million bug bounty following a massive security breach. As the DeFi space reels from yet another large-scale hack, the incident serves as a cautionary tale for other platforms, especially those dealing with cross-chain protocols. Whether the hacker will accept the reward offer and return the stolen assets remains to be seen.
