After the Wormhole hack on Wednesday, when the decentralized finance (DeFi) platform Wormhole became the victim of the largest cryptocurrency theft this year, Jump Trading restored every user’s funds, totalling to over $320 million.
The funds were returned to users after the Wormhole team got in contact with the hacker and offered $10 million in exchange for knowledge on how the hack was executed. The message read the following: “We noticed you were able to exploit the Solana VAA verification and mint tokens. We’d like to offer you a whitehat agreement, and present you a bug bounty of $10 million for exploit details, and returning the wETH you have minted.”
The crypto hack was among the top five largest of all time — when an attacker exploited a security flaw to make off with close to $325 million.
Wormhole, which advertises itself as being the ‘best of blockchains’ is a DeFi platform that allows users to swap solana directly for other cryptocurrencies on decentralized apps, or dApps, across the ethereum crypto network, a service also known as a “blockchain bridge.”
This hack on Wormhole Bridge, from Solana to other blockchains, could contribute to negative investor sentiment surrounding the Solana blockchain, which has had multiple outages over the past 6 months.
Marcus Sotiriou, Analyst at GlobalBlock, has a different opinion; “I think the problem lies within the bridges themselves, regardless of which blockchain they operate on. Last week there was a different bridge exploit on the Ethereum BSC bridge called Qubit. This is clearly a major risk within crypto, which can be mitigated by withdrawing coins directly from exchanges where possible.”
