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The Poly Network logo displayed on a phone screen with a physical representation of some cryptocurrencies.
Jakub Porzycki | NurPhoto via Getty Images

Nearly all of the $600 million stolen in one of the biggest cryptocurrency heists ever has now been returned by hackers.

Poly Network, the crypto platform targeted in the attack, said Thursday that all of the funds bar $33 million worth of the digital coin tether had been transferred.

The issuer of tether, a so-called stablecoin pegged to the U.S. dollar, used a built-in failsafe to freeze the assets soon after the theft.

In an unusual turn of events Wednesday, an anonymous person claiming to be the hacker said they were “ready to return” the funds. The identity of the hacker, or hackers, is not yet known.

Poly Network requested they send the money to three digital currency wallets. And, sure enough, the hacker had returned more than $342 million of the funds to those wallets by Thursday.

But there’s a catch. While almost all of the haul has been sent back to Poly Network, the last $268 million of assets is currently locked in an account that requires passwords from both Poly Network and the hacker to gain access.

“It’s likely that keys held by both Poly Network and the hacker would be required to move the funds — so the hacker could still make these funds inaccessible if they chose to,” Tom Robinson, chief scientist of blockchain analytics firm Elliptic, said in a blogpost Friday.

In a message embedded in a digital currency transaction, the suspected hacker said they would “provide the final key when _everyone_ is ready.”

Record ‘DeFi’ hack

Poly Network is what’s known as a “decentralized finance,” or DeFi, system. DeFi projects aim to use blockchain — the technology which underpins most cryptocurrencies — to replicate traditional financial services like loans and trading.

In Poly Network’s case, the DeFi system allows users to transfer tokens from one blockchain to another.

Someone exploited a vulnerability in Poly Network’s code which allowed them to transfer tokens to their own crypto wallets. The platform lost more than $610 million in the attack, according to researchers at security firm SlowMist.

Poly Network called it “the biggest in defi history.”

The self-proclaimed hacker claims they carried out the theft “for fun” and that it was “always the plan” to eventually return the funds.

CNBC could not independently verify the authenticity of the messages.

In a further message, the hacker claimed Poly Network offered them a $500,000 bounty to send all of the money back, and that they turned it down. The hacker shared what appears to be a statement from Poly Network promising that they would “not be held accountable for this incident,” effectively granting them immunity.

Poly Network did not return a request for comment from CNBC by the time of publication.

“Offering immunity may have sounded like a smart move from Poly Network to dangle a carrot, but it is unlikely that the authorities would agree with this decision nor even allow it,” said Jake Moore, a specialist at cybersecurity firm ESET.

“This attack is likely to have been watched closely by cybercriminals and law enforcement alike, potentially opening up the possibility of copycat attacks.”

Identifying the hacker

Robinson said the hacker “might well still find themselves being pursued by the authorities.”

“Their activities have left numerous digital breadcrumbs on the blockchain for law enforcement to follow.”

Cryptocurrencies are often the go-to for cybercriminals, particularly in ransomware attacks which lock down organizations’ systems or steal data while demanding a ransom payment to recover access.

That’s because the people sending and receiving digital currencies aren’t revealing their identities. However, it has become possible to trace the location of the funds by analyzing the blockchain, which contains a public record of all historical crypto transactions.

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Bluesky CEO Jay Graber says X rival is ‘billionaire proof’

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Bluesky CEO Jay Graber says X rival is 'billionaire proof'

Bluesky has surged in popularity since the presidential election earlier this month, suddenly becoming a competitor to Elon Musk’s X and Meta’s Threads. But CEO Jay Graber has some cautionary words for potential acquirers: Bluesky is “billionaire proof.”

In an interview on Thursday with CNBC’s “Money Movers,” Graber said Bluesky’s open design is intended to give users the option of leaving the service with all of their followers, which could thwart potential acquisition efforts.

“The billionaire proof is in the way everything is designed, and so if someone bought or if the Bluesky company went down, everything is open source,” Graber said. “What happened to Twitter couldn’t happen to us in the same ways, because you would always have the option to immediately move without having to start over.”

Graber was referring to the way millions of users left Twitter, now X, after Musk purchased the company in 2022. Bluesky now has over 21 million users, still dwarfed by X and Threads, which Facebook’s parent debuted in July 2023.

X and Meta didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Threads has roughly 275 million monthly users, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in October. Although Musk said in May that X has 600 million monthly users, market intelligence firm Sensor Tower estimates 318 million monthly users as of October.

Bluesky was created in 2019 as an internal Twitter project during Jack Dorsey’s second stint as CEO, and became an independent public benefit corporation in 2022. In May of this year, Dorsey said he is no longer a member of Bluesky’s board.

“In 2019, Jack had a vision for something better for social media, and so that’s why he chose me to build this, and we’re really thankful for him for setting this up, and we’ve continued to carry this out,” said Graber, who previously founded Happening, a social network focused on events. “We’re building an open-source social network that anyone can take into their own hands and build on, and it’s something that is radically different from anything that’s been done in social media before. Nobody’s been this open, this transparent and put this much control in the users hands.”

Part of Bluesky’s business plan involves offering subscriptions that would let users access special features, Graber noted. She also said that Bluesky will add more services for third-party coders as part of the startup’s “developer ecosystem.”

Graber said Bluesky has ruled out the possibility of letting advertisers send algorithmically recommended ads to users.

“There’s a lot on the road map, and I’ll tell you what we’re not going to do for monetization,” Graber said. “We’re not going to build an algorithm that just shoves ads at you, locking users in. That’s not our model.”

Bluesky has previously experienced major growth spurts. In September, it added 2 million users following X’s suspension in Brazil over content moderation policy violations in the country and related legal matters.

In October, Bluesky announced that it raised $15 million in a funding round led by Blockchain Capital. The company has raised a total of $36 million, according to Pitchbook.

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Alphabet shares slide 6% following DOJ push for Google to divest Chrome

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Alphabet shares slide 6% following DOJ push for Google to divest Chrome

Jaque Silva | Nurphoto | Getty Images

Alphabet shares slid 6% Thursday, following news that the Department of Justice is calling for Google to divest its Chrome browser to put an end to its search monopoly.

The proposed break-up would, according to the DOJ in its Wednesday filing, “permanently stop Google’s control of this critical search access point and allow rival search engines the ability to access the browser that for many users is a gateway to the internet.”

This development is the latest in a years-long, bipartisan antitrust case that found in an August ruling that the search giant held an illegal monopoly in both search and text advertising, violating Section 2 of the Sherman Act.

The potential break-up would include preventing Google from entering into exclusionary agreements with competitors like Apple and Samsung, part of a set of remedies that would last 10 years.

CNBC’s Jennifer Elias contributed to this report.

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Nvidia shares slump 3% in premarket as quarterly revenue growth slows

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Nvidia shares slump 3% in premarket as quarterly revenue growth slows

POLAND – 2024/11/13: In this photo illustration, the NVIDIA company logo is seen displayed on a smartphone screen. (Photo Illustration by Piotr Swat/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images

Nvidia shares dropped in U.S. premarket trading Thursday after the tech giant’s third-quarter earnings failed to impress investors.

Shares of the chipmaker slumped 3.21% at around 5:03 a.m. ET, following the Wednesday release of Nvidia’s quarterly results, which beat on both the top and bottom lines.

Revenue came in at $35.08 billion, up 94% year-on-year and exceeding the $33.16 billion forecast by LSEG analysts. Earnings per share was 81 cents adjusted, also above analyst expectations.

Other chipmakers fell on the back of the market reaction to Nvidia’s third-quarter results. Shares of Intel, Qualcomm and Micron Technology all lost 1% or more in value, while AMD declined 0.6%.

The slump in Nvidia also had a knock-on effect on European semiconductor firms. ASML, a key chip equipment supplier, dropped 0.9%, while compatriot Dutch chip firm ASMI fell 0.5%. Chipmakers BE Semiconductor, STMicroelectronics and Infineon slipped 0.8%, 0.7 and 0.6%, respectively.  

Several notable chip names were also in negative territory in Asia. TSMC, which makes Nvidia’s high-performance graphics processing units, eased as much as 1.5%. Contract electronics manufacturer Foxconn dropped 1.9%.

Why are Nvidia shares falling?

Nvidia has largely cornered the market for the high-powered chips powering the world’s most advanced artificial intelligence models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

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