Transit Swap Hacker Receives $690K for Returning $23M in Stolen Funds

The hacker that exploited cross-chain decentralized exchange (DEX) aggregator Transit Swap will be keeping $690,000 worth of Binance Coin (BNB) as a bounty reward for returning $23 million he stole funds from the platform. 

Transit Swap Hacker to Receive $690K as Bounty Reward

In a Monday blog post, the TransitFinance team announced that the hacker dubbed “white hat #1” has agreed to return 10,000 BNB (approx. 2.74 million in current prices) across two transactions. This will be an addition to $18.9 million of the stolen funds returned by the hacker last week.

TransitFinance stated that if the remaining funds are refunded as promised, no lawsuit will be filed against the hacker.

“TransitFinance Official expresses its gratitude to white hat #1 for the refund and promises that if white hat #1 returns the remaining 3500BNB as agreed, TransitFinance Official will no longer hold him any legal responsibility,” the platform said.

Per on-chain data, the hacker already transferred the 2,500 BNB ($685,000) to U.S.-sanctioned crypto mixer Tornado Cash.

On October 2, Transit Swap, a product of TransitFinance announced via a tweet that it has lost roughly $23 million worth of crypto after a hacker exploited an internal bug in a swap contract. 

Transit Swap noted that thanks to combined efforts from Peckshield, SlowMist, and TokenPocket, it was able to quickly obtain the hacker’s IP address, email address, and associated-on-chain addresses which have helped in the fund recovery process.

DeFi-Related Hacks on the Rise

While few DeFi-related projects like Transit Swap have seen their stolen assets refunded by hackers, a long list of others has suffered at the hands of attackers this year, resulting in huge losses on their platforms.

Per Chainalysis report, 97% of the $1.7 worth of crypto assets stolen in the first three months of 2022 were taken from DeFi projects, a 72% rise from the year prior.

In June, the decentralized lending platform, Inverse Finance suffered the second hack of 2022, losing roughly $1.26 million to hackers. Last month, DeFi protocol New Free DAO lost more than $1 million to hackers in a flash loan exploit.