Mixin Network offers $20M reward to hackers in $200M Hack

Mixin Network, a decentralized cross-chain protocol, offered a $20-million bug bounty to the hacker behind the $200 million exploit on Sept. 23 to return the remaining funds.

Mixin Network encrypts the message with the exploit transaction and asks the exploiter to return the money since most of the stolen funds are the property of the users.

“Most of our platform assets were users, and we hope you can get the money back. You can keep $20 million of the assets for BUG as a BUG bonus award.

Mixin Networks confirmed the exploit on September 25, where the exploits were able to breach a third-party cloud service provider, leading to the theft of nearly $200 million in assets from the platform.

[Announcement] On September 23, 2023, in the early hours of Hong Kong time, the database of cloud service provider Mixin Network was attacked by hackers, resulting in the destruction of some assets on the network. We've met Google and blockchain security company @SlowMist_Team…

— Mixin Kernel (@MixinKernel) September 25, 2023

Mixin founder Feng Xiaodong said at the time that the company would pay “at most 50%” of affected users, with the rest of the money returned in bond tokens and announced that the business would be bought with revenue.

Mixin is yet to provide full details on what led to the exploit, but an on-chain analytics platform has highlighted the hacker's history of connection to the Mixin Network. The hacker connected address 0x1795 received 5 Ether (ETH) from Mixin in 2022.

Related: Remitano Exchange Hacked for $2.7M; $1.4M frozen in Tether

While it's not yet clear how the exploiters managed to steal $200 million in assets through a data breach, cross-protocols in the decentralized finance (DeFi) space have been the target of some of the biggest exploits in crypto history. According to a report, more than half of DeFi exploits occur on off-chain protocols, resulting in over $2.5 billion in losses.

Cross-chain protocols facilitate interoperability between different blockchains, allowing users to transfer assets from one blockchain to another. Therefore, these cross-chain protocols often contain large amounts of assets from multiple chains, which makes them vulnerable to such exploits.

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