On April 18, the SafeMoon team released a blockchain message stating that the hacker responsible for stealing $8.9 million worth of Binance Coin (BNB) from their DeFi protocol had agreed to return 80% of the funds. SafeMoon had suffered the hack on March 28, resulting in the loss of 27,000 BNB. The hacker will keep the remaining 20% of the stolen funds as a bounty, and no charges will be filed against them. The SafeMoon team had been negotiating with the hacker since the hack to reach a settlement. This agreement follows a trend of DeFi protocols experiencing hacks recently, with some hackers returning a portion of the stolen funds after negotiations with development teams.
Some Web3 developers suggest that development teams should offer larger bug bounties to incentivize hackers to report bugs instead of exploiting them. The agreement shows that negotiation can be a viable solution to recovering stolen funds in such situations.