According to reports, on Monday, cryptocurrency valued at nearly $200 million was drained from Nomad Bridge, a major cross-chain token bridge. The attackers reportedly drained the protocol of most of its funds, drawing more scrutiny on the security of cross-chain bridges, which allow users to send and receive tokens between different blockchains. White-hat hackers and others reportedly returned $9 million of the lost funds to the bridge, mostly in the form of stablecoins, but most of the funds remain missing. Bridges usually work by locking tokens in a smart contract on one chain and then reissuing those tokens in wrapped form on another chain. But if the smart contract where tokens are deposited gets sabotaged – as happened in this attack – the wrapped tokens will no longer have backing, which can make them worthless. In a recent report, blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis estimated that around $2 billion in cryptocurrency has been stolen from cross-chain bridges in 13 separate hacks so far this year, with attacks on cross-chain bridges accounting for 69 percent of funds stolen this year.
For more information, please refer to the following links:
- Nomad Bridge Drained of Nearly $200M in Exploit
- Nomad Hacked, $45M Stolen So Far: Report
- Hackers Send Back $9M to Nomad Bridge After $190M Exploit
- Here's How $200M in Crypto Was Drained From Nomad Protocol, According to a Security Expert
- Vulnerabilities in Cross-chain Bridge Protocols Emerge as Top Security Risk
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