After a bug in their code allowed an attacker to make off with $80 million, Qubit immediately began trying to contact the exploiter and convince them to return the money. First they wrote that they were “prepared to offer the maximum bounty”, which was $250,000, or 0.3% of the amount the attacker had just stolen. The exploiter presumably felt that $80 million was truly the maximum bounty, and didn’t take them up on the offer. The next day, Qubit wrote a message asking the exploiter to “negotiate directly with us… if the maximum bounty offer is not what you are looking for”. The day after that, Qubit bumped the reward to $1 million (a whole 1.25% of the $80M!) and begged the exploiters to “please consider the big amount of people, families, stories involved in this”. On January 30, Qubit announced they would be offering “the highest bounty in history”, $2 million (2.5% of $80M), continuing to underscore that they wouldn’t seek prosecution if the attacker returned the funds. A number of hours later, Qubit apparently decided to change tactics, writing that they were “developing a website that users can easily search their losses related to the exploit… users can connect their wallets to get documents to report to the police”.