The Harmony blockchain network’s team has announced that Horizon, its cross-chain bridge to Ethereum, was robbed of nearly $100 million in ETH. The Harmony team has contacted national authorities and blockchain forensic experts to investigate the theft.
According to a tweet thread posted by the Harmony team, the theft occurred Thursday morning. As of press time, an address linked in the thread held 85,837.251 ETH, which was worth approximately $98 million.
1/ The Harmony team has identified a theft occurring this morning on the Horizon bridge amounting to approx. $100MM. We have begun working with national authorities and forensic specialists to identify the culprit and retrieve the stolen funds.
— Harmony 💙 (@harmonyprotocol) June 23, 2022
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“We have begun working with national authorities and forensic specialists to identify the culprit and retrieve the stolen funds,” the team said in a message, further writing:
“We have also notified exchanges and stopped the Horizon bridge to prevent further transactions. The team is all hands on deck as investigations continue. We will keep everyone up-to-date as we investigate this further and obtain more information.
Harmony developers also stated that their bitcoin bridge was unaffected, and that related assets “stored on decentralised vaults are safe at this time.”
The address of the perpetrator, which was linked in the announcement, currently holds approximately $99 in Ether. According to CoinMarketCap data, Harmony (ONE), the blockchain’s native token, has dropped nearly 9% as a result of the news.
For quite some time, the vulnerabilities of token bridges have been a hot topic in the cryptocurrency industry. In a Reddit post in January, Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin stated that they had “fundamental security limits.” Because of their complicated technology, token bridges are frequently targeted by hackers.
According to Dune Analytics data, there is $11.7 billion in total value locked in various Ethereum bridges with nearly 25,000 unique depositors.
Cross-chain bridges have been targeted in the past. Earlier this year, a bridge connecting Axie Infinity’s Ronin sidechain to the Ethereum network was compromised, resulting in a loss of over $600 million in cryptocurrency. Another such blockchain-to-Ethereum connection is the Horizon bridge.
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