$611 million was stolen from PolyNetwork, an interoperability project that aims to connect all of the major chains. One of my favorite commenters, Boxmining, was caught in the hack. This is a guy who has been in bitcoin since the retail mining days (BTC == $10-$50 or so). He's got connections in the space and seems to know about all of the good yield farms ahead of time.
Point is, if this guy can get caught and lose "a significant amount of my ETH/ BTC/ USDC savings" (his words, could be in the millions of dollars), anybody could.
The hack centered around the money locked in the PolyNetwork bridge between Ethereum and Ontology. I took a look at the technical description of the hack and my eyes started crossing. I can't help you here. What I can do is tell you how I avoid getting rekt like this even though I'm not a crypto codetech expert yet.
First of all, I went to the PolyNetwork after the hack to see what money was in danger of being hacked next. One thing I learned from the DAI vault hacks of early 2021 was that copycat hackers are a real thing. If you see one DAI vault get hacked, it's highly possible in this world of copypasta open source that any child vault would be the next victim.
The PolyNetwork site said that it currently connects Bitcoin, Ethereum, Neo, Ontology, Elrond, Zilliqa, BINANCE Smart Chain, Switcheo and Huobi ECO Chain. So I took all big money off of of those chains. If there's going to be a copycat hack, it will probably occur on another of these small up and coming chains like Elrond or Switcheo.
Second, I tried to understand as much of the techspeak as I could. From what I could decipher, the hack came from attacking a bridge that locked assets to serve as collateral for the derivative assets on the other chain. This looks like xAsset ---> Asset in dummyspeak. Meaning that if you hold anything that looks like a derivative of a large asset on a small chain, you could be in trouble. Stuff like pETH or oBTC or zilAAVE, if that stuff exists. It just means that the value of your asset is guaranteed by locked assets in a contract instead of assets that are native to that chain. This is another reason to remove your stuff from the smaller chains that PolyNetwork connects until they get some real money behind them. (Hate to say I'm waiting on the VCs to take the risk, but I guess that's what I'm doing.)
Third, using common sense and splitting up your investments between chains is a good idea. There are plenty of chains with good yield farms that aren't on that PolyNetwork list like Tezos, Cosmos, and Solana. Those probably aren't using copypasta of Ontology code, so their protocols are safer. But overall, I'm constantly moving funds to hard storage, away from all of this shit. That's an everyday thing.
The PolyNetwork site also lists a bunch of protocols on its homepage that I guess are partners. Well, it might be a good idea to remove your funds from those partners for the time being. Wing Finance was the first listing under defi on the page, and that's exactly the protocol that Boxmining was using when he got atomic bomb rekt. Other notable protocols on that list included Flux, o3swap, BSCStation, BSCPad, and Fei.
Again, I'm not a technical wizard. Yet! But I think the above actions may help. If anyone with technical knowledge wants to tell me where I was wrong or something, feel free in the comments.
And dudes, this is why I CONSTANTLY yell that those little bullshit 6% returns on your BTC or ETH from Blockfi or Gemini aren't worth the risk. If you're going to lend your crypto to any protocol, defi or cefi, you'd better be demanding 3-digit APRs (not APYs, APRs). This whole space is in beta, and shit like PolyNetwork can happen anywhere to any protocol. I'd rather hold my shit in cold storage until I get ready to borrow against it. That also buys me time to see what protocols are strongest. Stay rekt-free.
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