It's a bad streak for the cryptosphere, a dark series likely not to reassure even the evangelists of this nascent industry, who claim with shout and horn that decentralized finance, or DeFi, is the future of financial services.
These projects, which aim to use blockchain technology to remove intermediaries, want to make even the most complex and risky financial assets accessible to everyone.
But its objective is likely to suffer from the many attacks and security breaches that the most promising DeFi projects currently present.
Wormhole, a DeFi protocol that links blockchain Solana, dubbed by Bank of America's analysts the Visa (V) of crypto, with other decentralized blockchain networks, has just reported that hackers have stolen cryptocurrencies valued at more than $323 million.
"This is the largest attack to date on the Solana ecosystem," according to blockchain security firm CertiK.
The hackers stole 120,000 wEth, or wrapped ether, the native token of the Ethereum blockchain, one of the largest, Wormhole's team said on their Twitter account.
Wormhole operates a Solana bridge, an infrastructure that connects Solana blockchain to other blockchains. Basically, Wormhole enables users to move assets from one blockchain to another.
When a user sends, for example, assets in Ethereum from Solana or vice versa, Wormhole or the other bridges receive them, hold the assets and then create a wrapped version of the funds to the recipient blockchain.
It was this bridge that was targeted.
"Attacker(s) exploited a mint function on the Solana side of the Wormhole bridge to create 120,000 wETH for themselves, then used these minted tokens to claim Ethereum that was held on the Ethereum side of the bridge," CertiK explained.
A total of 120,000 Ethereum was stolen, valued at more than $323 million at current prices.
The Wormhole team offered a bounty of $10 million to the hacker(s) to return the money.
The project also said last night that the vulnerability has been "patched" but the system is not back on yet.
"We're actively working to get portal back up and running. A fix has been deployed and all funds are safe," read a message on its website.
"The full extent of this attack still remains to be seen," CertiK warned. "It is possible that Wormhole’s bridge to the Terra blockchain shares the same vulnerability as their Solana bridge."
This latest hack is likely to have significant consequences because Wormhole is one of the most popular bridges between the Ethereum and Solana blockchains.
Last week, the DeFi Qubit project was the victim of a similar hack. The hackers stole 206,809 binance coins worth $80 million, according to the platform.
