The Harmony layer-1 blockchain management team has announced a bounty equivalent to 1% of the $100 million in cryptocurrency stolen in last week’s Horizon Bridge incident.
On June 26, the team tweeted that the group has pledged $1 million toward recovering the money that had been taken from the Horizon Bridge on June 23. “Harmony will advocate for no criminal charges when funds are returned.
There have been worries that the tiny payoff amount would not be sufficient to encourage the attacker to return the money.
The Harmony blockchain, Ethereum network, Binance Chain, and Bitcoin are all connected through the Horizon Bridge, a token bridge. This attack has no impact on the Bitcoin bridge.
Harmony’s offer might be too low for the hacker
Harmony’s reward offer is not as prominent as other well-known exploits this year. In May, the Rari Fuse attacker was given $10 million, or 12.5% of the total taken. The $7.6 million that the Beanstalk Finance team granted represented 10% of the total money that was taken advantage of in April.
The cryptocurrency trader nicknamed on Twitter “Degen Spartan” dubbed the reward offer an “insulting sum” since it is so low.
“Imagine losing 100m and thinking you’re in a position to lowball for a 1% bounty lmwo these people are just doing performance art to mitigate legal liability.”
On June 25, Harmony creator Stephen Tse posted an update on the bridge attack, stating that the team had discovered evidence that private keys had been accessed, which had resulted in the breach of the bridge rather than a smart contract code breach.
Tse said that since the event, the Ethereum side of the bridge had “migrated to a 4-5 multisig.” An individual from the community raised the risk of the multisig wallet in April, however, the team did not respond to the matter until today.