The cybercriminal who carried out a large-scale hack of the decentralized platform Verus has agreed to return digital assets worth a total of $8.5 million. This decision was made as part of an official agreement, the terms of which the crypto project's team publicly posted on the social network X. As a reminder, during the initial hack, recorded on May 18, several different cryptocurrencies, worth a combined total of approximately $11.4 million, were illegally withdrawn from the system.

According to verified data from cybersecurity analysts at PeckShield, a tranche of 4,052.4 ETH, equivalent to 75% of the total stolen funds, was deposited into the Verus developer wallet. The remaining digital assets, amounting to 1,350 ETH and valued at approximately $2.8 million, remained in the hacker's possession. Representatives of the affected project informed the hacker the day before that, if the principal amount was returned, the crypto community would completely cease the ongoing investigation, drop any legal charges, and officially recognize the remaining millions as his legitimate reward for discovering the vulnerability.

The incident itself occurred due to a compromise of the security mechanisms of the cross-chain bridge connecting the Verus ecosystem to the Ethereum blockchain, from which the attacker managed to extract large amounts of tBTC, ETH, and USDC stablecoins, subsequently converting them into a single currency. Commenting on the details of the incident, the development team emphasized that the hackers most likely employed advanced artificial intelligence tools to carry out this attack, which take modern cybersecurity threats to a fundamentally new level. To minimize similar risks in the future, Verus representatives announced a comprehensive independent audit of the entire infrastructure and promised to develop an internal plan to compensate for the remaining losses without the involvement of third-party venture capital investment.