The decentralized finance (DeFi) space has recently faced severe criticism regarding security breaches and hacks. However, Polygon recently employed a new method to secure its network.
In a unique initiative, Polygon paid a white-hat hacker who discovered a vulnerability in its network with a USD 2 million reward. Essentially, the exposure, found by the hacker Gerhard Wagner, helped Polygon avoid the potential loss of USD 850 million.
Immunefi, a bug bounty platform that hosts Polygon’s bounty program, revealed that the bounty paid by Polygon is the enormous bounty ever paid in the DeFi space.
No user funds were lost
Thank you @g3rh4rdw4gn3r for responsibly disclosing the bug, and @immunefi for facilitating the bug bounty of $2,000,000
👷♀️Let's build and make web 3.0 more resilient from such future attacks.
You can read the detailed postmortem of the exploit here 👇 https://t.co/svhfo2cewS
— Polygon | $MATIC (@0xPolygon) October 21, 2021
As a result, Wagner discovered the vulnerability in Polygon’s Plasma Bridge. Immunefi explained that the weakness could have allowed an attacker to exit their burn transaction from the bridge multiple times. According to the report, up to 223 times, meaning the Deposit Manager for the Plasma Bridge could have been severely drained.
Also, the security breach didn’t lose the user’s funds. The program allows white-hat hackers to rummage smart contracts and other code, looking for vulnerabilities in the system.
In a statement, Mithcell Amador, Managing Director at Immunefi, lauded Wagner for his diligence and ability to identify the weakness. “We congratulate Gerhard on his great work and his excellent reporting and appreciate the quick response, the improvement, and the prompt disbursement from Polygon.”
Moreover, via his medium page, Wagner explained that the vulnerability might be due to “using someone else’s code and not having a 100% understanding of what it does.”
I just published a write up on the double spending bug I found in @0xPolygon's Plasma bridge https://t.co/MpOZmE7b0Z and submitted through @immunefi
— Gerhard Wagner (@g3rh4rdw4gn3r) October 21, 2021
What Makes Polygon Unique?
Polygon is the Layer 2 solution on Ethereum. It uses many different protocols. These include zk-rollups and optimistic rollups to scale Ethereum and provide faster and cheaper transactions.
Also, the platform uses a POS (Proof-of-Stake) consensus to secure the network and create its tokens. Also, Polygon aims to offer a framework for blockchain networks that would allow users to create interconnecting blockchain networks.
$MATIC Price
Polygon’s native token, $MATIC, was trading at USD 1.84 and has dropped 2.8% in the last 24 hours. Also, the current market cap is USD 12.4 billion, and the 24-hour trading volume is USD 1.2 billion.
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