The hacker who breached the ZKsync protocol returned 90% of the stolen crypto assets.

The ZKsync team reported that a hacker transferred nearly $5.7 million to the ZKsync Security Council address on Ethereum through three transactions. First, he transferred ZK tokens worth $2.47 million and ethers worth $1.83 million. Then the hacker returned another 776 ETH worth $1.4 million.

ZKsync reported that the hacker struck a deal with the developers, who asked him to return the stolen cryptocurrencies within 72 hours for a reward. Otherwise, ZKsync would have referred the case to law enforcement for investigation. Given that the hacker followed all of ZKsync's instructions, the case is closed with no consequences for the hacker.

The ZKsync team assured that users' funds were not compromised. The creators of the protocol promised to publish a detailed report on the security breach. The incident occurred on April 15 — a hacker hacked the ZKsync administrator account. This allowed the use of a specific contract function to distribute coins during the airdrop. The attacker stole 111 million unclaimed ZK tokens, which were worth about $5 million at the time of the attack.

The returned $5.7 million nominally exceeded the value of the originally stolen crypto assets due to the increase in their market value. After the attack, ZK and ETH rose by 16.6% and 8.8%, respectively. However, the return of assets did not affect the further growth of the ZK token. On the contrary, it fell by 3% over the day. The token is currently trading at $0.05469, and its market capitalization is $201 million.

Recently, the decentralized exchange KiloEx was affected by a hacker attack, from which crypto assets worth $7.4 million were stolen. Later, the hacker agreed to return part of the funds to the exchange — 1.4 million USDT stablecoins.