Harmony offers $1M bounty, but will it be enough for hackers to return funds?

The bounty offered by the Harmony layer1 blockchain project team is equivalent to only 1% of the $100 million in cryptocurrency stolen by the Horizon Bridge hack last week.

Harmony tweeted on June 26 that the team had pledged to pay $1 million to get back funds stolen from Horizon Bridge on June 23. It also said, "Harmony will advocate for the return of funds without criminal charges."

However, there are also concerns that this modest bounty may not be enough of an incentive for attackers to return their funds.

Horizon Bridge is a token bridge between the Harmony blockchain and the Ethereum network, Binance Chain and Bitcoin. The Bitcoin bridge was not affected in this attack.

Harmony's bounty offer ranks low compared to other high-profile hacks this year. The $10 million given to the Rari Fuse attackers in May was 12.5 percent of the total stolen. The Beanstalk Finance team provided $7.6 million, or 10 percent of the amount stolen from the protocol in April.

Harmony’s bounty offer was so low that a cryptocurrency trader named Degen Spartan on Twitter called it an “insulting amount.” He added: "Imagine losing $100 million and thinking you're eligible for a bounty of just 1%, I guess these people are just doing performance art to mitigate legal liability."

In an update on the response to the Horizon Bridge hack on June 25, Harmony founder Stephen Tse tweeted that the hack was not the result of the smart contract code being cracked, but instead, the team discovered the breach of the private key. evidence, leading to the bridge being attacked.

Since the incident, the ethereum side of Horizon Bridge has migrated to “4-5 multisigs,” Tse said. Multi-signature wallets require only 2 out of 5 signers, a bug that was raised by a community member in April, but the Harmony team didn't fix it until now.

A multisig wallet is a type of crypto wallet that requires multiple keyholders to approve transactions. These wallets are often used for crypto projects.

As of this writing, the Horizon Bridge hacker has not transferred the stolen funds to the Ethereum mixer Tornado Cash or any other anonymizer.

Harmony has not lost hope, as its $1 million bounty is not the smallest ratio of funds lost. In 2021, the Poly Network interoperability platform was hacked, costing $610 million. The team’s proposed bounty of $500,000, representing only 0.08% of the total amount stolen, was rejected by the hackers, but fortunately, the hackers returned the funds.