Nomad Hackers Return $22M Following Bridge Attack

About $22 million has been returned to cross-chain bridge Nomad after an easily-replicable exploit allowed multiple hackers to steal funds from the protocol on Monday.

Nomad Recovers Funds From $190M Hack

Nomad’s recovery wallet has received more than $22 million following Monday’s nine-figure hack on its cross-chain bridge. 

Etherscan data show that as of 15:52 UTC on August 5, the Nomad recovery fund had received the equivalent of $22 million in various tokens including ETH, USDC, USDT, DAI, CQT, FRAX, wBTC, and wETH. 

Nomad is a bridge that lets users send tokens between Ethereum, Evmos, Milkomeda, and Moonbeam. It suffered a major attack after an exploit was uncovered Monday, with the vulnerability allowing numerous opportunists to take funds from the bridge without requiring any in-depth knowledge. The bridge suffered a loss of about $190 million before the breach was patched.

Some “white hat” hackers raided the bridge specifically to return the funds to the Nomad team. On Tuesday, the Nomad team posted the address to a recovery wallet commencing 0x94A8. It later said it was working with law enforcement and the financial crime investigation firm TRM Labs. Nomad offered hackers a 10% bounty for the safe return of any funds taken from the bridge, saying they would not face any legal action if they return 90% of their takings. 35 wallets had sent tokens to the recovery wallet at press time, 11 of which returned funds after the bounty was announced.

The crypto space has suffered from several major cross-chain bridges this year. In addition to the Nomad incident, $550 million was stolen from Axie Infinity’s Ronin bridge in March, and last month Harmony’s Horizon bridge was hacked for $100 million. 

Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author of this piece held ETH and several other cryptocurrencies.