Takeaways
- “As far as we can tell now, only wETH has been affected, no other tokens,” Wormhole Admin wrote on Telegram
- Hackers were offered a $10 million bounty for information on exploits and the return of stolen wrapped ether.
Wormhole, one of the largest bridges between Solana and other blockchains, has been hacked for about $320 million, or 120,000 ether — making it the second largest DeFi hack to date.
In a Wednesday evening tweet, the interoperability protocols confirmed that this exploit had occurred.
“ETH will be added over the next hours to ensure wETH is backed 1:1,” The protocol was written. “More details to come shortly. We are working to get the network back up quickly.”
Wormhole stated earlier that network maintenance had been scheduled. According to its website, it stated “Portal is Temporarily Unavailable” At the time of publishing.
Last week, hackers stole 80 million dollars from the decentralized Qubit Finance protocol.
Wormhole, a blockchain-based protocol allows users to transfer assets from one chain to another. Over $1 billion is locked in the protocol, which supports six different blockchains including Terra Smart Chain, Solana Ethereum Binance Smart Chain Avalanche Polygon.
The bridge locks the transfer and adds a wrapped version of the asset, like wrapped ether, to the final chain.
“As far as we can tell now, only wETH has been affected, no other tokens,” In its Telegram group, a Wormhole admin who uses the name d231d posted a message. The admin also added that there is no portal bridge and requested members to refrain from initiating any further transactions.
A few users have reported that their transactions are stuck but admin has confirmed this. “as soon as the network is back up, you will be able to redeem the tokens you sent into the bridge.”
According to Etherscan, the hackers exploited three transactions at around 2 pm on Wednesday.
About an hour after the attack, Wormhole offered a reward to the hacker for returning the tokens.
“We noticed you were able to exploit the Solana VAA verification and mint tokens,” The message read: “We’d like to offer you a whitehat agreement, and present you a bug bounty of $10 million for exploit details, and returning the wETH you’ve minted.”
The exploiter has not responded. Comment on the protocol wasn’t immediately available.
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