Hackers gained access to $100 million in altcoins over the Horizon Bridge to the Harmony layer-1 blockchain. Which they now exchange for Ether (ETH). The Horizon Bridge exploit may prove the community’s earlier reservations. Which is about the reliability of the two of four multisig that supposedly secures the bridge.
Horizon Bridge exploit under investigation
The Horizon Bridge facilitates token transfers between Harmony and the Ethereum network, Binance Chain, and Bitcoin. According to an announcement made late on June 23 by Harmony, the bridge’s operator, the bridge has been in suspension. It said that the attack had harmed neither the BTC bridge nor its assets.
Eleven transactions for various tokens were from the bridge between 7:08 and 7:26 a.m. ET. They’ve recently started sending tokens to a different wallet, exchanging for ETH on the Uniswap decentralized exchange (DEX). Then return the ETH to the original wallet.
The Harmony team also stated that it is working with “national authorities and forensic specialists” to discover who is to blame.
Already forewarned yet still went ahead
The reliability of Horizon’s multisig wallet on Ethereum, which only required two of the four signers to drain the funds, has previously been questioned. The low number of required signers would expose the bridge for “another nine-figure hack,” said Chainstride Capital CEO Ape Dev on Twitter on April 2.
Given that the bridge’s assets are currently down by $100 million, Ape Dev’s prediction seems to have come true.
In a January Reddit post, Vitalik Buterin also addressed the concerns with token bridges. He contended that when bridges are exploited, the liquidity of each chain is jeopardized. In addition, he said that as the number of token bridges grows, the prospect of a 51% attack on one chain may provide a bigger risk of infection to others.
Meter’s token bridge, Axie Inifinity’s Ronin Bridge, and the Wormhole Bridge have been exploited for roughly a billion dollars since his prediction.