How This Defi Project Just Lost $320 Million In Ether?

Wormhole, a connection between Solana and other popular blockchains, was defrauded of $320 in wrapped Ethereum (wETH). This was the second-largest attack in the history of the decentralized concern abstraction network. Wormhole engineers arrive with a whitehat statement for the hacker and a cash reward. PolyNetwork, the victim of the most significant Defi breach to date, effectively instrumentally received its stolen cash in August, within weeks of communication with the perpetrator.

An Expensive Bug

Earlier today, developer Kelvin Fichter revealed that attacker created a related Solana and took it from the Ethereum network. 

Alright. I figured out the Solana x Wormhole Bridge hack. ~300 million dollars worth of ETH drained out of the Wormhole Bridge on Ethereum. Here’s how it happened.

— smartcontracts (@kelvinfichter) February 3, 2022

Connection with Jump Trading Group

Jump Trading Group stated in August that it had purchased Certus One, a company that assisted in the development of Wormhole. Jump claims to be one of Wormhole’s first code contributors. Certus One provides infrastructure services for proof-of-stake blockchains and has contributed to decentralized networks such as Cosmos, Terra, Solana, and Ethereum Next. 

Is This A Forewarning?

In a lengthy Reddit post published last month, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin cautioned about the security weaknesses of centralized cross-chain bridges, warning that they were at grave risk of a 51 percent attack. However, Jonathon Wu, the development lead at Aztec Community, points out that the Wormhole attack comes down to a simple contract flaw, which means Buterin’s warning won’t apply in that specific circumstance.

The wormhole attack is the latest in a string of setbacks for Solana, the cryptocurrency that boasts cheaper transaction costs than Ethereum. Last October, Solana was down for 17 hours after being attacked by trading software bots. Bots have lately impaired the network’s performance. According to tracker CoinMarketCap.com, Solana’s SOL coin has dropped 9% in the previous 24 hours.