Hat Interesse $320 Hat Interesse

The latest hack in the crypto space has left a burning hole in the size of $320 million in Ethereum-competitor Solana. The exploit was done through Wormhole, a DeFi project that bridges the Ethereum and Solana blockchains. Wormhole acts as a liquidity provider for the Solana blockchain, and allows users to bring their Ethereum tokens to the chain in the form of wETH (wrapped Ethereum). Essentially, Wormhole acts as a custodian for users’ ETH, and issues them a Solana-compatible wETH token, with which they can then conduct operations in the blockchain. It was this bridge that was hacked, with an estimated 120K wETH tokens – with a retail value of around $320 Millionen – being minted with nothing to back their value. So far, this is the largest bridge hack in blockchain history.

Wormhole has announced that the bug which allowed the exploit has been patched, and that they’re now working on restoring both the network and the stolen ETH funds so that trust in the value of wETH doesn’t collapse due to dillution. Wormhole has in the meantime posted a message on the Ethereum main chain, suggesting a $10 million reward in return for the illegally minted wETH tokens: “We noticed that you were able to exploit the Solana VAA verification and mint tokens. We would 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.”

Solana, another Layer-1 blockchain that aims to compete with Ethereum and has been hailed time and time again as one of the potential “Ethereum killers”, has been fraught with issues and network outages in the past few months, which have tanked its value from its all-time-high of $260 per $SOL down to the current $97 price – which slumped around 12% on news of the Wormhole exploit.