Shanghai Man: Hack of little-known Poly Network highlights East-West crypto divide

This weekly roundup of news from Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong attempts to curate the industry’s most important news, including influential projects, changes in the regulatory landscape, and enterprise blockchain integrations.  

After ThorCHAIN and Chainswap were exploited, it’s safe to say that hacking cross-chain bridges seems to be the style of the season. This week, it was local project Poly Network that was fleeced of $615 million before leading the crypto community on a dramatic witch hunt to track down the attacker. While most news outlets have covered this story extensively, there are still a few points worth dissecting. 

Who are these projects?

The first point is that most western DeFi users had never heard of Poly Network despite them amassing over $600 million in total value locked. Dovey Wan of Primitive Capital covered this on Twitter when she noted that the, “Chinese crypto community always have their own version to utilize the same blockchain infra, for good and for bad, most are unseen and lack of accessibility to westerners.”

Only after Poly got hacked most CT came to know this “crosschain” project with over $500m TVL, just as the PlusToken case in 2018

There are a VERY vibrant but completely different “Defi” communities happening in mainland China, despite the ban, despite many rugs and hacks

— Dovey “Rug The Fiat” Wan