All funds stolen in the high-profile Poly Network attack earlier this month have been returned, the company has confirmed.

In a blog post on Monday 23rd August, the firm confirmed that the individual responsible for the attack – dubbed ‘Mr. White Hat’ – shared a final private key required to access the locked funds.

“Mr. White Hat publicly shared a private key in his possession to the ¾ multi-signature wallet through an on-chain message,” the company wrote.

“At this point, all the use assets that were transferred out during the incident have been fully recovered. Thanks to Mr. White Hat’s cooperation, Poly Network has officially entered the fourth phase of our roadmap,” Poly Network added.

The final batch of returned tokens included 28,953 ETH, Poly Network revealed, along with 1,032 WBTC. In total, this final batch amounted to around $141 million dollars.

Poly Network is now faced with the task of returning the final assets to users. The firm insisted it will work to return all stolen tokens “as swiftly as possible”.

Poly Network attack | How the incident unfolded

Poly Network was first hit on 10th August. More than $610 million in cryptocurrency was stolen during the breach, making it the single-largest crypto heist in history.

Amidst the initial furore of the incident, Poly Network issued a plea via social media urging those responsible to return the assets. The company also offered to pay the – at this point, still unknown – hacker a $500,000 bug bounty in exchange for the return of stolen assets.

“The amount of money you hacked is the biggest one in DeFi history,” the company said in its appeal. “Law enforcement in any country will regard this as a major economic crime and you will be pursued.”

“You should talk to us to work out a solution,” the statement added.

Early on, information started to emerge about the hacker responsible for the attack. Tom Robinson, co-founder of crypto firm Elliptic conducted a Q&A with the individual, who revealed they were an ethical hacker and carried out the attack “for fun”.

According to Mr. White Hat, the intention had always been to return the stolen cryptocurrency after highlighting security vulnerabilities.

“That’s always the plan! I know it hurts when people are attacked,” they said. “But shouldn’t they learn something from those hacks?”

“I didn’t want to cause real panic in the crypto world… I took important tokens and didn’t sell any of them,” the culprit added.

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Within hours of the attack, Mr. White Hat began returning the stolen funds. After just three days, the hacker had returned nearly half of the stolen currencies, which included at least $3 million in Ethereum.

As the return of stolen assets progressed, last week CNBC reported that Poly Network had even offered the hacker an advisory position at the firm.

“To extend our thanks and encourage Mr. White Hat to continue contributing to security advancement in the blockchain world together with Poly Network, we cordially invite Mr. White Hat to be the Chief Security Advisor of Poly Network,” the company said in a post online.

In its confirmation statement yesterday, the firm thanked the hacker for “keeping his promise”, adding that the its partners and “multiple security agencies” had been helpful throughout the process.