Hackers Stole $613 Million in Digital Tokens from Poly Network

Hackers recently pulled off the biggest ever cryptocurrency heist, stealing $613 million in digital coins from token-swapping platform Poly Network, only to return $342 million worth of tokens less than 24 hours later.

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Poly Network is a decentralized finance (DeFi) platform that facilitates peer-to-peer transactions with a focus on allowing users to transfer or swap tokens across different blockchains.

For example, a customer could use Poly Network to transfer tokens such as bitcoin from the Ethereum blockchain to the Binance Smart Chain, perhaps looking to access a specific application.

Poly Network was launched by the founders of Chinese blockchain project Neo.

Poly Network operates on the Binance Smart Chain, Ethereum and Polygon blockchains. Tokens are swapped between the blockchains using a smart contract which contains instructions on when to release the assets to the counterparties.