Sun Offers 5% Bounty to Poloniex Hackers Who Stole $126M
Justin Sun, the recent acquirer of Poloniex, a global digital asset exchange, has responded to the theft of over $126 million in assets by offering a 5% reward to the responsible hackers.
After experiencing significant losses on November 10, Sun took to X (formerly Twitter), urging the hackers to return the funds within seven days to avoid potential legal consequences.
In a tweet, Sun proposed a 5% reward, specifying ETH/TRX/BTC wallets for the hackers to return the funds. He set a seven-day timeframe for their consideration, emphasizing the legal repercussions of non-compliance.
Changpeng Zhao (CZ), CEO of Binance, also weighed in on the Poloniex hack, expressing hope for a quick resolution and pledging assistance if any stolen funds reached Binance.
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The incident, initially reported as a $100 million loss, later escalated to $126 million. The breach occurred in a wallet labeled Poloniex 4 on Etherscan, involving around 357 transactions and the theft of various assets, including ETH, USDT, BTC, USDD, USDC, ETH, FLOKI, and TUSD.
Hackers further manipulated the stolen funds, using them to inflate the value of TRX, the native token of Justin Sun’s associated Tron blockchain. Within 40 minutes, the attackers pumped over $22 million into TRX on the Tron blockchain.
Alexander Stefanov
Reporter at CoinsPress
Alex is Editor-in-Chief of Coinspress and co-founder of Millennial Media Group, with nearly a decade of experience covering financial markets - crypto first, then everything else. It started in 2016 with Bitcoin. Like most people at the time, he didn't fully understand it - so he kept digging. Blockchain, tokenomics, the projects, the cycles. That curiosity never stopped, and eventually pulled him into traditional markets too: equities, commodities, macro. Not because he left crypto behind, but because you can't properly understand one without the other. What drives him is straightforward: he wants to know why something is happening, not just that it's happening. Most market coverage stops at the headline - price up, price down, here's a chart. Alex finds that kind of reporting actively unhelpful. If you walk away from an article without understanding the mechanism behind the move, what did you actually learn? He holds a degree in Tourism from New Bulgarian University - not the most obvious path into financial markets, but markets have a way of pulling in people who are simply too curious to stay out. He has authored over 200 in-depth analyses and more than 10,000 articles across crypto and traditional finance. He still thinks every day in markets teaches him something new. That's probably why he hasn't stopped.
