Over $190 Million Drained From Nomad Bridge
A flaw in the Nomad bridge resulted in the loss of millions of dollars worth of crypto.
The Nomad bridge is a decentralized protocol that allows users to transfer digital assets between different blockchains, including Avalanche (AVAX), Etherium (ETH), Evmos (EVMOS), Milkomeda C1, and Moonbeam (GLMR).
Although details from Nomad are scarce, some point to a misconfiguration in the smart contract that the protocol uses to process messages as the cause, which has allowed millions to be drained from Nomad’s liquidity pool.
Initial outflows from Nomad’s bridge contract focused on wrapped Bitcoins (WBTC), which were affected, as well ass wrapped Ethereum (wETH) holdings and later the stablecoin USDC. Cryptocurrencies worth $190 million were withdrawn.
It is also unclear whether the attack was the work of one actor or several. Blockchain data suggests that the transactions may have been constructed to give the impression of multiple participants.
We are aware of the incident involving the Nomad token bridge. We are currently investigating and will provide updates when we have them.
— Nomad (⤭⛓🏛) (@nomadxyz_) August 1, 2022
Sam Sun, a researcher at crypto investment firm Paradigm, shared how he spotted the attack.
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“Although I had no idea what was going on at the time, the sheer volume of assets leaving the bridge was clearly a bad sign.”
Sun stressed that minimum technical knowledge was required to execute the exploit.
“You don’t need to know about Solidity, Merkle Trees or anything like that.”
All you had to do was find a transaction that worked, find/replace the other person’s address with yours, and then redistribute it.
Alexander Stefanov
Reporter at CoinsPress
Alex is Editor-in-Chief of Coinspress and co-founder of Millennial Media Group, with nearly a decade of experience covering financial markets - crypto first, then everything else. It started in 2016 with Bitcoin. Like most people at the time, he didn't fully understand it - so he kept digging. Blockchain, tokenomics, the projects, the cycles. That curiosity never stopped, and eventually pulled him into traditional markets too: equities, commodities, macro. Not because he left crypto behind, but because you can't properly understand one without the other. What drives him is straightforward: he wants to know why something is happening, not just that it's happening. Most market coverage stops at the headline - price up, price down, here's a chart. Alex finds that kind of reporting actively unhelpful. If you walk away from an article without understanding the mechanism behind the move, what did you actually learn? He holds a degree in Tourism from New Bulgarian University - not the most obvious path into financial markets, but markets have a way of pulling in people who are simply too curious to stay out. He has authored over 200 in-depth analyses and more than 10,000 articles across crypto and traditional finance. He still thinks every day in markets teaches him something new. That's probably why he hasn't stopped.
