The Indian crypto exchange WazirX’s Co-Founder Nischal Shetty announced a prize of $23 million as a part of its “bounty program” for recovering the $234 million assets stolen in the hacker attack, according to a post on the social media platform X on Sunday, July 21.
“The total bounty has been updated to $23M thanks @zachxbt for the suggestion,” said Nischal Shetty, co-founder of WazirX on the social media platform X.
This is the second time the founder has increased the reward amount to regain the stolen assets worth $234 million. It started with WazirX introducing the “bounty program” offering to pay $10,000 worth of USDT “for actionable intelligence that leads to freezing the funds,” and also “a 5% incentive of the recovered amount as a white hat reward,” according to the post on X.
The total bounty has been updated to $23M thanks @zachxbt for the suggestion 🙏 https://t.co/qzaqwAuLod
— Nischal (Shardeum) 🔼 (@NischalShetty) July 21, 2024
WazirX’s Bounty Program’s initial reward move was criticized by netizens for the small reward value. The reward value was then increased to $11.5 million offered for recovering the assets. The co-founder then followed up on his post with another announcement of a prize bump-up clocking in $23 million offered for the recovery of the assets, according to the posts on X.
This comes after the Indian crypto exchange was hit by a security breach during European hours resulting in the loss of funds from one of its wallets on Thursday, July 18. WazirX confirmed the incident and started investigating the outflows, temporarily suspending all withdrawals for the day.
Mint reported earlier that blockchain data tracked by Lookonchain shows that more than $100 million worth of Shiba Inu (SHIB) tokens were withdrawn, followed by Ethereum (ETH) worth $52 million, Matic (MATIC) worth $11 million, Pepe (PEPE) worth $6 million, marking the biggest loss of funds.
Later it was seen through the transactional data that the hacker was selling the stolen cryptos on the Uniswap on-chain exchange. WazirX blacklisted more than 2,431 accounts from October 2022 to March 2023 which were deemed unlawful.