In a remarkable scene straight out of Hollywood, unknown hackers stole $1.6 million in MATIC from Polygon. Shockingly, this occurred shortly after Polygon fixed a bug, highlighted by two ethical security hackers (known as white hats).
Losing $2 million worth of MATIC is clearly horrendous, but it could have been so much worse. If Polygon didn’t act quickly, the hackers could have struck again. In fact, $24 billion worth of MATIC was potentially at risk. Matic is the native token of Polygon, the Ethereum based layer two scaling network.
“Considering how much was at stake, I believe our team has made the best decisions possible given the circumstances,” said Polygon co-founder Jaynti Kanani.
Whitehat hacker, Leon Spacewalker, found the bug. He reported the security hole on December 3rd. Leon will receive $2.2 million for his efforts. The second anonymous hacker, Whitehat2, will also receive 500,000 MATIC ($1.27 million) from Polygon as their reward for stopping further hackers.
Polygon acted quickly to fix the bug, resolving it at block 22,156,660 via an emergency upgrade to the mainnet on December 5th. However, it was too late for Polygon, and the hackers stole 801,601 MATIC, worth $2 million.
Finally, ethical hackers are a credit to the crypto community. This would have been a catastrophic situation without them, and many people would have lost vast sums of money. Bug bounty platform Immunefi helps to spot these issues. Additionally, Immunefi helped Polygon to resolve the bug.
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