Hacker’s Change of Heart

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It’s not every day you see a hacker with a conscience, but it seems the person behind the recent $40 million GMX exploit has had a sudden case of the guilties 🤔. After sending an onchain message that basically said “my bad, I’ll give it back,” they started returning the stolen funds 🤑.

The message, flagged by blockchain security firm PeckShield, read: “Ok, funds will be returned later.” We’re not sure what prompted this change of heart, but we’re guessing it might have something to do with the $5 million bounty offered by the GMX team 🤑.

The Great Crypto Return-a-Thon

About an hour after the message, the hacker started returning the stolen crypto. At the time of writing, they’d already sent back around $9 million in Ether (ETH) to the Ethereum address specified by the GMX team 📈. Not bad for a start!

But wait, there’s more! PeckShield also reported that the attacker returned about $5.5 million in FRAX tokens to the GMX team, followed by another $5 million in FRAX tokens 🤑. That’s a total of around $20 million in assets returned so far 🤯.

For those who missed the drama, the exploit targeted a liquidity pool on GMX v1, the first iteration of the perpetual trading platform deployed on Arbitrum 📊. The attacker drained various crypto assets from the platform after exploiting a design flaw that allowed them to manipulate the value of GLP tokens 🤦‍♂️.

A Bounty Fit for a White Hat

The GMX team took an… let’s say, “interesting” approach to dealing with the hacker. They offered a $5 million bounty for the return of the funds, which they promised would be categorized as a white hat bounty 🤑. This would allow the hacker to spend the money without worrying about, you know, being arrested 🚔.

“You’ve successfully executed the exploit; your abilities in doing so are evident to anyone looking into the exploit transactions,” GMX wrote. “The white hat bug bounty of $5 million continues to be available.” We’re not sure if this is a compliment or a veiled threat, but it seems to have worked 🤷‍♂️.

On the other hand, the GMX team also threatened to pursue legal action if the hacker didn’t return the stolen funds ⚖️. In an onchain message, they told the hacker they’d pursue legal action in 48 hours if the funds weren’t returned. Talk about a ticking clock ⏰!

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2025-07-11 13:26