Harvest offers $100K bounty to track down hacker—while claiming to know who stole $24M

Do you know the person who managed to siphon away a reported $24 million from Harvest Finance’s liquidity pools? If so, you could be in for a massive windfall.

The decentralized protocol is offering a $100,000 bounty for information that leads them to the attacker responsible for the heist, which triggered a dramatic run.

According to DeFiPulse.com, the total value locked in Harvest Finance has tumbled by 55.6% over the past day—that’s a fall of about $600 million.

If you know, act fast because Harvest also said it has a pretty good idea who the hacker is. On Twitter, the protocol claimed that there’s “a significant amount of personally identifiable information on the attacker, who is well-known in the crypto community.”

Harvest added that it isn’t interested in revealing the identity of the person responsible (an act known as “doxxing”) and instead just wants funds returned to the users.

Flash loans were used to execute the theft—and according to CoinGecko, the incident has been nothing short of disastrous for Harvest’s FARM token, which has fallen by 59.1% to $96.03 at the time of writing.

A collaboration with the Ren Protocol helped identify the 10 Bitcoin addresses where the funds were sent.

‘You’ve proven your point’

Several hours after offering the bounty through its official Twitter account, Harvest tried a different approach to resolving the matter: appealing to the attacker directly. The protocol wrote:

Harvest’s tweets also admitted that an “engineering mistake” was made, but added: “Thousands of people are acting as collateral damage.”

The protocol’s reaction to the incident prompted one Twitter user to post the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

Making amends

The DeFi community is now awaiting a post-mortem report from Harvest, with the protocol vowing to “work on future risk mitigation strategies against flash loan economic attacks, including evaluating insurance options, as well as reparation strategies.”

But even in the unlikely situation that the attacker decides to make amends, the short, sharp withdrawal of capital from Harvest’s protocol suggests the damage has already been done.

Overall, it’s been a rather bruising day for the DeFi market. Between midnight and 6pm on Oct. 26, the total value locked across all protocols has tumbled by 10%—sliding from $12.4 billion to $11.1 billion.