Jimbos Protocol offers $800,000 bounty to the public after hacker ignores deal

Jimbos Protocol, the decentralized finance platform (DeFi), has offered 10% of the exploited funds to the general public after giving the hacker several days to respond to the deal.

On May 28, the Arbitrum-based DeFi app was abused, resulting in a loss of 4,000 Ether (ETH). After taking advantage of the lack of slippage control on liquidity conversions, the exploiter was able to steal assets worth about $7.5 million at the time.

After the hack, the team behind the exploited protocol tried to negotiate with the hacker. The DeFi protocol offered 10% of the exploited funds as a bounty and threatened the hacker with prosecution. The team offered what they described as a “quick $800k payday” but said if 90% of the money isn’t paid back, they won’t stop until the hacker is behind bars.

After giving the hacker some time to respond, the protocol recently announced that it would be expanding the bounty offer to the general public. In a Twitter thread, the DeFi protocol announced that anyone who could provide information leading to the capture of the exploiter or recovery of the money would qualify for the reward.

It’s been quiet for a few days. Let’s catch up.

We’ve already talked about our bounty, 10% of the stolen money (~$800k USD). We’ve given the hacker time to meet the bounty, but they’re clearly not interested, so we’re committed to doing what we said we were going to do.

— Jimbos Protocol (v2, coming soon) (@jimbosprotocol) May 31, 2023

In addition to that, the team also mentioned that they already are to work with a law enforcement agency focused on blockchain cybercrime investigations. Furthermore, the team said they would share future plans for the protocol and a recovery plan for the victims of the exploit.

Related: Hack Negotiations: Why Platforms With Ineffective Bounty Programs Pay A Higher Price

While the recent hack shows that some hackers may not be willing to negotiate, other bounty negotiations have been successful. On April 4, the Euler Finance team recovered 90% of the hacked funds after offering the exploiter a bounty of $19.6 million. Similarly, the Sentiment lending protocol also managed to recover 90% of its money from a hacker after offering a 10% bounty to the exploiter.

Magazine: Should crypto projects ever negotiate with hackers? Probably