Solana Hacked Once Again Via Wormhole Bridge, Loses Over $320 Million

Solana (SOL) has suffered a major setback as a result of a recent $322 million breach on its Wormhole bridge. SOL fell during the uncertainty surrounding wETH&39s support for the bridge, although it has since recovered slightly.

Nonetheless, a sizable portion of investors and traders are growing increasingly wary about backing Solana due to an apparent lack of sufficient security safeguards, especially since this is not the first time that it has been hacked.

What happened?

As aforementioned, an attacker obtained $322 million in ETH by exploiting the bridge protocol Wormhole. Wormhole has estimated the worth of the assault at a whopping 120,000 ETH. According to various early reports, the funds stolen during the attack were initially worth 80,000 ETH. Later, it was revealed that the amount taken was a lot more than what was previously thought. The reason for the lower estimations was that they did not appear to account for stolen funds which were held on Solana as wrapped ETH (wETH).

Regardless, the sheer quantity stolen via the incident makes this one of the most significant DeFi attacks in recent memory. Other high-profile hacks include a $611 million attack on Poly Network in August of last year. Other notable attacks in 2021 also involved BadgerDAO and Cream Finance.

Next steps

As of now, Wormhole has not yet provided a full explanation of the hack as instead they have stated that the network is "offline for maintenance as it investigates a potential vulnerability". Additionally, Wormhole developers sought to get in touch with the attacker through a blockchain message. The team reportedly reached a "white hat deal", offering the culprit $10 million in exchange for revealing their exploit method and returning the stolen assets.

Meanwhile, Jump Crypto decided to replace the stolen funds, which is why they donated 120,000 ETH as their team believes that Wormhole is an integral part of a multichain future. Some investors were not impressed however as they primarily viewed this as little more than a bailout attempt which doesn&rsquot address the main issue at hand.

In early January, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin issued a warning about the inadequacies of cross-chain bridges, citing the security dangers inherent in such protocols. On a lighter note, Solana recently launched their new P2P (Peer To Peer) feature which enables their users to pay merchants directly and seamlessly.