On June 24, Harmony’s Horizon Bridge was reported to have been hacked with 100 million USD in losses. According to Harmony, the address of the culprit has been identified and the Harmony team is working with “national authorities and forensic specialists” to retrieve the stolen funds. Stolen tokens include 13,100 ETH (worth $14.1M), 592 WBTC ($12.4M), 9.9 million USDT, 41.2 million USDC, 6 million DAI, 5.5 million BUSD, 5.6 million FRAX, 84.6 million AAG ($1.3 million), 110,000 FXS ($607K), 415,000 SUSHI ($518K), and many ERC-20 tokens.
The hacker then converted the ERC-20 tokens into ETH and transferred them all to a wallet address. This wallet currently holds more than 85,867 ETH, worth over $98 million.
Horizon stated that only the Ethereum bridge has been exploited, the Bitcoin bridge is still safe. However, Harmony has stopped the Horizon bridge to investigate as well as prevent further transactions. Harmony’s ONE token has dropped slightly after the hack was announced.
Blockchain bridges or cross-chains play an important role in DeFi space that allow users to transfer tokens from one blockchain to another. They have become the prime target of hackers due to vulnerabilities in their underlying code. Many attacks related to blockchain bridges happened within the last 1 year such as Poly Network (lost $611M in August 2021), Wormhole ($325 million – February 2022) and most recently, Ronin of Axie Infinity ( drained $622 million – March 2022).
Because of many vulnerabilities, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin once said that he doesn’t like cross-chain bridges as they have limits on the issue of security.
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