Harmony Protocol has announced a bounty worth $1 million for returning the funds that were maliciously extracted from Horizon Bridge. Additionally, Harmony Protocol has committed not to advocate criminal charges for returning the funds and sharing exploited information.
The announcement was made through the official Twitter handle of Harmony Protocol, where followers shared a mixed reaction to this move.
Some appreciated the offering of a bounty, saying that knowing how the network was hacked was more crucial, and accompanying it with a guarantee of not advocating criminal charges was a much-needed shield.
However, others did not make this announcement in a good spirit. Many followers believe that whoever was behind the attack must be punished so that another similar incident is not encouraged.
A follower replied, saying that even if the attacker came forward, the same attacker might compromise another system again. Another follower highlighted that the information about the attack was more important.
Harmony Protocol was informed about the attack on June 23, 2022, following which the team immediately complained to all the relevant authorities, namely the FBI, exchange partners, and cyber security partners.
All the teams agreed to work towards identifying the culprit and retrieving the stolen funds.
Harmony underlined the importance of investing more in decentralized bridges as people have started moving towards Web3, a phase entirely based on decentralization. Multiple transactions had hit the network, with eleven successfully extracting funds worth $100 million.
Harmony Protocol is an open and fast blockchain that runs Ethereum applications with 2-second finality and 100 times lower fees. It facilitates the transfer of tokens across five chains, namely Binance and Ethereum.
Every type of chain can be connected through the protocol. Whether Proof-of-Work or Proof-of-Stake, both can be connected using Harmony Protocol’s bridges. The platform functions on three pillars of principles, namely:-
- Scalability
- Security
- Decentralization
The pillars or principles mentioned above enable the platform to balance the connection with secure and random state sharding. It has a total of $1.09 billion of value locked with transaction fees going as low as $0.0001.
Harmony aims to offer users freedom from being jammed at a certain chain, therefore promoting interoperability to revolutionize the future of Web3.
It has set a roadmap, with the short-term objective being to bring the finality down to 1-second from 2-second by the end of the fourth quarter of 2022. Other objectives to be accomplished by the same time are:-
- zkSync rollups
- Decentralized ops
- ONE annual conference
- Private authentication
After four years, Harmony is eyeing to bring the best results of Zero-Knowledge Proofs to production and decentralize governance through thousands of DAOs.
The investigation is ongoing in the matter of the Horizon Bridge hack, with the community waiting for more details on it. The community is also waiting for the update on the bounty announced by Harmony Protocol via its official Twitter account.
