Harmony Dangles $1M Reward For Return Of $100M Stolen Funds – Is It Enough?

Harmony Protocol wants its money back. Seriously – and without any charges.

Harmony has offered a $1 million bounty for anyone who can provide information that can lead to the retrieval of the stolen funds from the hack of its Horizon bridge.

The company disclosed on June 24 that a hacker infiltrated their Horizon bridge firewall and carted off with an easy $100 million.

Now, it wants the monies returned and is giving away a large amount in exchange.

Just Return The Money And There’ll Be No Charges: Harmony

According to a weekend tweet from the company’s official account, “Harmony will advocate for no criminal prosecution when the funds are returned.”

We commit to a $1M bounty for the return of Horizon bridge funds and sharing exploit information.

Contact us at whitehat@harmony.one or ETH address 0xd6ddd996b2d5b7db22306654fd548ba2a58693ac.

Harmony will advocate for no criminal charges when funds are returned.

— Harmony (@harmonyprotocol) June 26, 2022

This disclosure follows a similar method taken by other crypto organizations affected by attacks in an effort to recoup stolen assets.

Following the hack, Harmony stated that it had already ceased all Horizon bridge activities. As of this writing, its native ONE token was trading for $0.02444, which is 8.4 percent less than before the hack was detected on Friday.

Harmony announced previously that it had began coordinating with national authorities and forensic experts to uncover the perpetrator and recover the stolen monies.

The crypto Twitter community has dismissed Harmony's $1 million prize offer as "a drop in the ocean." Image: Crickey.

Hacking Spree Nets Millions Of Dollars

Recently, hackers have been attacking cross-chain bridges. Hackers took $80 million from Qubit Finance’s bridge in January, $320 million from the Wormhole bridge a month later, and $622 million in Ethereum and USDC from Axie Infinity’s Ronin bridge in March.

Optimism Foundation was able to retrieve stolen assets after a hack that led to the loss of 20 million Optimism (OP) tokens in early June. The Foundation disclosed that the hacker was a whitehat, or an ethical hacker. Moreover, the intruder retained 2 million tokens as a bounty.

In August of last year, Poly Network sustained a $610 million exploit and promised a $500,000 reward for its recovery. As was the situation with Optimism, the hacker returned the stolen funds and, surprisingly, received a job offer from Poly Network.

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According to the global computer security software company McAfee, the annual cost of cybercrime is approximately $1 trillion, or roughly 1% of the U.S. gross domestic product.

The costs of cybercrime are frequently determined by a variety of variables, such as the extent of damage caused, the theft of certain property (intellectual or otherwise), and the amount of stolen funds.

$1 Billion Bounty By Harmony A Joke?

Meanwhile, the $1 million bounty proposed by Harmony has been deemed a drop in the ocean by the crypto Twitter community, who believe the reward should be significantly bigger.

“Really? Only 1M out of 100M? I feel like you gotta offer at least 8M to be taken seriously” – (@0xButthole).

“Didnt they take about 100 million? What the hell is 1 million gonna do?” – (@pleasesendmebtc).

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Crypto total market cap at $941 billion on the daily chart | Source: TradingView.com

Featured image from DoughRoller.net, chart from TradingView.com