Poly Network Hacker Returns $258 million

GlobalBlock Market Commentary 12/08/2021

By Freddie Williams

Bitcoin and most major altcoins remain above their respective 200-day moving average, but the market’s momentum will depend on whether BTC can pierce the $48,000 level. Bitcoin’s strong recovery and march toward the psychological level at $50,000 has improved the overall sentiment in the crypto sector. That has boosted the total crypto market cap to over $1.9 trillion. The bears have been attempting to pull the price back below the 200-day simple moving average ($45,091) for the past two days, but the bulls have held their ground.

If buyers propel the price above $46,700, the BTC/USDT pair is likely to start its journey toward the $50,000 to $51,500 resistance zone. The bears will try to stall the rally in this zone but if the bulls can overcome the challenge, the pair could rise to $60,000. Altcoins have been positive with the majority of the top 20 coins wqq showing green over the last 24 hours. XRP is up 12.5% and MATIC is up 7%

$258 million worth of stolen crypto assets have been returned so far and the hacker claims they are keeping the rest of the funds safe while they negotiate with Poly. In what is being described as the largest DeFi hack to date, the Poly Network suffered a $612 million exploit on August 10th which saw the hacker steal assets from Ethereum, Binance Chain and the Polygon Network. The hacker has now returned $258 million worth of funds to Poly so far with $342 million yet to be returned. The hacker conducted an AMA (Ask Me Anything) using embedded messages in Ethereum transactions. When asked why they were hacking and why the Poly protocol, the hacker states, “for fun” and because “cross-chain hacking is hot”. The Poly team posted an open letter to the hacker yesterday that urged them to return the stolen assets as “law enforcement in any country will regard this as a major economic crime and you will be pursued.”

Ethereum’s London hard fork, a long-awaited network upgrade that included a measure to reduce the supply growth of ETH, went live just last Thursday. What a difference a week makes. Since the hard fork, over $100 million in ETH has been burned, or taken out of circulation, helping fuel a price increase from $2725 to $3230. Over 10% of the burned fess have come via transactions on the NFT marketplace OpenSea, where people can sell or bid on digital collectibles and art. Decentralized exchange Uniswap and blockchain-based game Axie Infinity rank second and third in terms of burn rate.

AMC, the US cinema chain that owns Odeon, says it will allow customers to pay for movie tickets and concessions in Bitcoin by the end of the year. Boss Adam Aron said it has been exploring the technology and “how else AMC can participate in this new burgeoning cryptocurrency universe”. This is an exciting time for Bitcoin with an increasing number of businesses beginning to accept it as payment as it becomes more mainstream. Some big business names include AT&T, Microsoft and Wikipedia.

More than $1billion in fees have been generated for Uniswap’s liquidity providers since its November 2018 launch. It has become the first DeFi protocol to generate more than $1 billion worth of platform fees for liquidity providers.