Upon having suffered a massive cyber theft running into $234 million in the cryptocurrency exchange WazirX on Thursday, the platform announced a whopping bounty of $23 million for the recovery of the stolen assets.
It has invited white hat hackers, blockchain forensic specialists, and cybersecurity experts globally to join in this recovery effort.
WazirX is offering up to 10 percent of the recovered funds, depending upon the success of the recovery process and its verification. "This bounty could potentially reach $23 million, making it one of the largest ever offered in the crypto sector," the platform stated.
WazirX's founder, Nischal Shetty, took to the site to explain: "So, recovery of stolen funds is the first and top priority." This bounty program is created in order to engage the community with expertise in achieving this critical objective, he added.
The bounty program will stay open for a period of three months.
The breach occurred on July 18, seeing $234 million worth of cryptocurrency being siphoned off from the WazirX's multisig Ethereum Wallet.
WazirX's trading volume drastically fell in December of the previous year to $1 billion in 2023, dropping a massive 90 percent compared to 2022. In general, the decline occurred amid an increasing grip of regulation and implementation of a very strict crypto tax regime by the Indian administration. The administration charged an unprecedented 30 percent tax on virtual currencies and 1 percent on each crypto transaction in 2022. Moreover, the cases of investigation by the ED were also opened relating to transactions in cryptocurrency under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002, and the Foreign Exchange Management Act, 1999.
Read also | US issues warning on Microsoft outage, Satya Nadella Assures Restoration Efforts
Read also | Dissecting the Microsoft Outage: CrowdStrike's Explanation of the Incident
