Analysis and technical overview of the 2nd biggest heist in history with a particular focus on the Polygon blockchain

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                                                                           by @TZMCrypto - data provided by [Flipsidecrypto](<https://www.flipsidecrypto.com/>)

🗓️ Timeline of events

According to the official website:

Poly Network is built to implement interoperability between multiple chains in order to build the next-generation internet infrastructure. Authorized homogeneous and heterogeneous public blockchains can connect to Poly Network through an open, transparent admission mechanism and communicate with other blockchains. Poly Network has already integrated Bitcoin, Ethereum, Neo, Ontology, Elrond, Zilliqa, Binance Smart Chain, Switcheo, and Huobi ECO Chain.

It all started on August, 10th 2021 with a series of tweets from Poly Network's official account:

https://twitter.com/PolyNetwork2/status/1425073987164381196

As soon as the news came out, numbers and stats started flooding everybody's timelines and what stuck out the most was the incredible sum of $600M+ that was apparently stolen by a hacker (yes, the attack was carried out by a single individual).

According to the first reports, the stolen funds had the following distribution:

Some of the assets involved were $WBTC, $WETH, $RenBTC, $DAI, $USDT, $UNI $SHIB, and $FEI.

Quickly after, the whole community and crypto industry got involved. Tether's CEO also announced that some of the funds were instantly frozen. Talk about decentralization huh 😉

@Tether_to just froze ~33M $USDT on 0xC8a65Fadf0e0dDAf421F28FEAb69Bf6E2E589963 as part of the #PolyNetwork hack

It goes without saying, the magnitude of this hack was huge. One of the biggest heists in history, second only to that one time when Saddam Hussein sent his son to get $1B from the Iraqi Central Bank in cash. In 2003, it took 3 whole larries to transport the money out. This time the hacker had to sit behind its computer at home while carrying out the biggest DeFi hack to date.

💀 Exploit