The crypto world in general and Poly Network in particular were on the edge of their seats the past few days after hackers pulled off the biggest crypto heist ever.

$613M was taken from Poly Network on Tuesday, and in a bizarre turn of events, $260M was returned 24 hours later.  First off, it is not even entirely clear where Poly Network is based or who runs the company, although Coindesk has reported that it was started by the founders of the Chinese blockchain project Neo.

The hacker, as yet unidentified, apparently lost his or her nerve and may have realized this exploit was one keystroke too far. Or perhaps, though more unlikely, this was some kind of white hat exercise to test the security of the network with the intention of returning the stolen assets all along.

A brief rundown of other big crypto hacks:
Mt. Gox:  a crypto exchange based in Japan that suffered a $460M heist.

CoinCheck:  another crypto exchange in Japan was hacked for $500 million in 2018

If you want a more thorough history of famous crypto heists and hacks, check out this article from the Winklevoss’ Gemini exchange.

According to a series of tweets by Kelvin Fichter, an Ethereum programmer, the hackers appeared to have figured out how to override smart contract instructions and divert the funds to three wallet addresses of their choosing. 

The only silver lining, if you want to call it that, of this escapade was encapsulated by Tom Robinson, chief scientist of blockchain analytics firm Elliptic who said “I think this demonstrates that even if you can steal cryptoassets, laundering them and cashing out is extremely difficult, due to the transparency of the blockchain and the use of blockchain analytics.

Easy peasy to share this story with your peeps