In response to pNetwork's statement on the GALA incident today, Huobi Global's reply on what actually happened is as follows:

We think that pNetwork's action is not a "white hat" operation, but a malicious hack driven by profit and bad faith.

We have 3 reasons to back our argument and we have sorted out the key event timeline relevant to Huobi Global, you can click the Detail to read them.

To sum up, we have reason to believe that:

pNetwork's action is not a "white hat" operation, but a malicious hack with profit as its the ultimate goal. We believe that this is a premeditated attack planned by the pNetwork team, and the white hat operation is just an illegal excuse sought by the pNetwork team to avoid legal consequences.

In its dealing with this incident, Gala and pNetwork teams never tried to reach Huobi Global via official communication channels to confirm the security and feasibility of their plans. Rather, they acted in bad faith and abused their management permission on BNB Chain by minting over 55.6 billion GALA tokens for profitable sell-offs.

The GALA and pNetwork teams could have used other safer method to fix the vulnerability and avoid this unfortunate incident from happening. However, they chose to cover up the facts and executed a massive attack involving 55.6 billion GALA tokens within 50 minutes after contacting the exchanges. This is a malicious attack motivated by profit and is tantamous to a terrorist attack on innocent users and platforms. The entire industry has suffered a huge blow because of this incident.

Not long before, on behalf of our users victimized by pNetwork's actions, Huobi Global communicated and negotiated with the pNetwork team in good faith for reasonable compensation to the victims. However, we did not receive an acceptable response from pNetwork as of the time this statement is published.

In view of pNetwork's unconfirmed unilateral statement on the GALA incident that seriously deviates from the facts, it shows how the project team is attempting to shirk responsibilities, while causing significant damage to the asset security of Huobi Global users. As the world's leading virtual asset trading platform, protecting our users' interests and safeguarding asset security have always been the core responsibility of Huobi Global since our establishment nine years ago. To fulfil our commitment to our users, we will take the lead in gathering and representing the victims of Huobi Global, and we will work with global partners to exercise all legal means, including class actions and lodging police reports, to investigate and pursue criminal charges against the perpetuators from pNetwork.

We urge all attackers who exploited the security vulnerability to return the unjustified gains. Huobi Global is willing to pay the attackers from our $1 million bounty fund and not pursue any legal action against them. Lastly, we would like to reiterate that Huobi Global always stand by our users, and we will not stop until all of our users' reasonable demands are satisfied.