According to the latest news sources, the famous blockchain bridge, Wormhole, has reportedly lost more than $326 million in a supposed crypto hack. The news was confirmed through the official Twitter account of Wormhole, where the team has tweeted that the bridge was presently “unavailable’. The Wormhole team is reportedly investigating the potential hack. The hack was discovered when the on-chain analysts highlighted a suspicious 80,000 ETH transaction on Wormhole. The 80,000 ETH were transferred to an account that currently holds ETH worth more than $250 million. Another developer informed that the hacker had also stored 40,000 ETH on the Solana blockchain.
Since the news came out, a famous researcher of Paradigm security, who goes by the pseudonym ‘samczsun’ has tweeted further developments on the matter. The tweet said that the Wormhole team has reportedly contacted the hacker’s address which exits on Ethereum. It further said that Wormhole had offered the hacker a bounty of $10 million for returning the funds. The news of the $326 million-worth hack has alarmed the DeFi community since it means that the ETH bridged to the Solana network is quite possibly unbacked. Cross-blockchain bridges like Wormhole usually take a digital asset like ETH and lock it in a contract so that a parallel asset can be issued on the bridged chain.
At present, there is no clarity on what the ramifications would be for the Solana markets if the bridged ETH cannot be bridged back to the main chain of Ethereum. Wormhole came out with another tweet later on, where it confirmed that they had suffered a total loss of around 120,000 ETH. The company is planning to add funds to the bridge in order to backstop the wrapped ETH.
