The Poly Network hacker has at present returned $258 meg to the cross-chain decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol and conducted a question-and-answer session detailing how the initial hack went down.

In what is being described as the largest DeFi hack to date, the Poly Network suffered a $612-million exploit on Tuesday that saw the hacker steal assets from Ethereum, Binance Chain and the Polygon Network.

Tom Robinson, the master scientist at blockchain analytics firm Elliptic, told Forbes on Wednesday that the hacker has now returned roughly $258 one thousand thousand worth of funds to Poly so far — with $342 million nevertheless to be returned.

The aggressor stated their willingness to return the stolen funds on multiple occasions, which has led to suggestions that it may take been a white hat hack to teach Poly an expensive lesson about its security flaws.

However, that view wasn't necessarily shared by Robinson, who stated that the returning of funds "demonstrates that even if you tin can steal crypto-assets, laundering them and cashing out is extremely difficult due to the transparency of the blockchain."

The hacker has conducted an Inquire Me Anything (AMA) using embedded letters in Ethereum transactions, and while they appear to be a non-native English speaker, what's lost in translation is their thousand programme.

When asked why they were hacking and why the Poly protocol, in item, the hacker states "for fun" and because "cantankerous-concatenation hacking is hot."

Despite such answers, they then proceed to claim the hack was conducted for noble causes and that they have since been transferring tokens betwixt addresses only to keep them safety:

"When spotting the problems, I had a mixed feeling. Ask yourself what to do had you facing and so much fortune. Asking the project team politely then that they can fix it? Anyone could be the traitor given ane billion. I can trust nobody! The only solution I tin come up with is saving it in a trusted account."

"Now anybody smells a sense of conspiracy. Insider? Not me, but who knows? I accept the responsibility to expose the vulnerability before any insiders hiding and exploiting it!" they added.

Users on Twitter noted that the hacker was asking for guidance on how to deposit funds into Tornado Cash, which is a decentralized protocol that enables individual Ethereum transactions.

The attacker was also quizzed on why they had been selling and swapping some of the stolen stablecoins, in which they responded with: "I was pissed by the Poly team for their initial response."

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The Poly team posted an open letter to the hacker on Wednesday that urged them to return the stolen assets as "police force enforcement in any country will regard this every bit a major economic crime and you will be pursued."

The hacker goes on to say that "they urged others to blame me and detest me before I had whatever run a risk to reply!" and that they had no intentions of laundering the coin:

"In the meanwhile, depositing the stables could earn some interest to cover potential cost so that I have more time to negotiate with the Poly team."