$1 million reward offered to return crypto funds stolen from Horizon Bridge

Last week, hackers stole $100 million in cryptocurrency from Harmony’s ‘Horizon Bridge’, a platform that was designed to allow users to be able to transfer their crypto assets between blockchains.

The platform allowed users to exchange assets such as tokens, stable coins and NFTs, between the Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain (BSC) and the Harmony blockchains. The platform was built in 2018 designed to balance scalability with security and decentralisation.

On discovering the theft, Harmony then released a statement on Twitter saying that the “team has identified a theft occurring this morning on the Horizon bridge amounting to approx. $100MM”.

The company reassured users of the platform that it was working on the issue and “have begun working with national authorities and forensic specialists to identify the culprit and retrieve the stolen funds.” Horizon took preventative measures to ensure the damage could not get worse and “notified exchanges and stopped the Horizon bridge to prevent further transactions. The team is all hands-on deck as investigations continue. We will keep everyone up to date as we investigate this further and obtain more information.”

However, Harmony has still not been able to trace the stolen funds and as a result, the company is now offering an eye-watering sum of money as a reward in an attempt to retrieve the stolen funds. Horizon posted another tweet on June 26th saying it will “commit to a $1M bounty for the return of Horizon bridge funds and sharing exploit information”. The company has even attempted to entice the hackers themselves to return the stolen funds by tweeting that it will “advocate for no criminal charges when funds are returned”.

According to DeCrypt, cross-chain bridges have been a target for hackers in recent times, most notably earlier this year, with hackers stealing $622 million worth of Ethereum and USDC from Axie Infinity’s Ronin Bridge.