One of the most popular bridges linking the Ethereum and Solana blockchains became a victim of a hack attack on Wednesday resulting in a crypto theft worth more than $320 million.
Developers representing Wormhole confirmed the exploit on its Twitter account, saying the network bridge is currently down while the team investigates a potential exploit.
The official website says that the portal is temporarily unavailable.
Wormhole is a protocol that lets users move their tokens and NFTs between Solana and Ethereum.
Crypto holders often do not operate exclusively within one blockchain ecosystem; so developers have built cross-chain bridges to let users send their digital assets from one chain to another.
It is DeFi’s second-biggest exploit ever, and the largest attack to date on Solana; which is increasingly gaining traction in the non-fungible token (NFT) and decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystems.
“The $320 million hack on Wormhole Bridge highlights the growing trend of attacks against blockchains protocols,” blockchain cybersecurity firm CertiK co-founder Ronghui Gu was quoted as saying by CNBC. “This attack is sounding the alarms of growing concern around security on the blockchain.”
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Meanwhile, the founder of Solana DeFi platform Step Finance, George Harrap, told CoinDesk he expects Jump Capital; which purchased Wormhole developer Certus One, to step in to backstop the hacked ETH.
Otherwise, he said, a number of Solana-based platforms that accept ETH as collateral may now be partially insolvent.
“If nobody backs it and the coins are truly gone then Wormhole ETH is worth 0 and everyone who has a balance of it becomes worthless, DeFi protocols, users, everyone,” Harrap said.
Cryptocurrency platforms have suffered a number of high-value hacks in recent years.
In August, Poly Network was hit by a major attack that saw; the hacker steal more than $600 million worth of tokens.
The theft was thought to be the biggest crypto heist ever; surpassing the $534.8 million stolen from Japanese digital currency exchange Coincheck in 2018 and the estimated $450 million worth of Bitcoin that went missing from Tokyo-based Mt. Gox in 2014.
Poly Network’s hacker, however, gave back nearly all of the money; with the exception of $33 million of Tether that was frozen by its issuers.
