The hacker behind the $5.8 million recent Loopscale exploit is in talks to return the stolen funds in exchange for a bounty, the Solana-based protocol said. 

The exploiter pilfered approximately 5.7 million USDC (USDC) and 1,200 Solana (SOL) tokens from two of Loopscale’s yield vaults on April 26, prompting the decentralized finance protocol to temporarily pause its lending markets. 

The following day, the hacker sent a message on the Etherscan blockchain scanner “indicat[ing] a willingness to return the exploited funds in exchange for a bounty,” Loopscale said in an April 27 X post. 

“We are agreeable to collaborating with you to reach a white hat agreement. However, we would like to negotiate the bounty percentage; our…