The head of a cryptocurrency exchange offered to pay hackers $ 5 million for each attack

Sam Bankman-Fried, CEO of FTX, has proposed to pay hackers a reward of $ 5 million or 5% of the stolen crypto assets to minimize the consequences of hacks and exploits.

Benkman-Fried called his idea the «5−5 standard»: hackers will be able to keep 5% of the stolen funds or a fixed amount of $ 5 million, whichever is less. In this way, the FTX chairman hopes to encourage hackers to act in good faith and return most of the funds by cooperating with the developers of the hacked protocols.

«Hacker attacks are extremely disruptive to the digital asset ecosystem. The5−5 standard would allow us to limit the negative impact of hacker attacks on the industry by 98% ,» Benkman-Fried wrote.

With the 5−5 standard, any attacker can turn into a «white hacker» who helps to expose vulnerabilities in a project in exchange for a good reward. The FTX executive’s offer came after the recent hack of the Mango Market trading platform, which lost $ 114 million worth of digital assets. The hacker then contacted the platform’s team and offered a deal: the hacker was ready to return the tokens on the condition that they would be used to cover users' bad debts. The Mango Markets community voted to make a compromise with the hacker: he keeps $ 47 million as a reward, and $ 67 million is returned to Mango Market. Mango’s management agreed to this proposal and assured that it would not initiate a criminal investigation.