Wormhole Protocol Suffers $323 Million Hack
According to a series of transactions on etherscan, a hacker used Wormhole, a bridge between the Ethereum and Solana blockchains, to swipe hundreds of millions in ETH.
Wormhole is a protocol that allows assets to move across different blockchain protocols. When a user sends assets from one chain to another, the bridge locks the assets and issues a ‘wrapped’ version of the funds on the chain in which they are received.
It is not yet clear how the malicious actor executed the exploit, but it resulted in the theft of 120,000 wETH, worth about $323 million at current prices. Transaction records on etherscan detail the theft of 93,000 of the total ETH stolen. This is one of the largest hacks of a decentralized financial protocol to date.
Wormhole posted on Twitter that the platform will be down for maintenance as it investigates the attack and will provide updates via its Twitter account. The company later shared an update confirming that 120,000 wETH had been stolen from the platform, with more details to come.
READ MORE: Hacker Drains $115 Million From DeFi Protocol BadgerDAO
In the meantime, the platform said it will add additional ETH over the next few hours to ensure wETH continues to be backed 1:1.
“We’re working to restore the network quickly” it said in a tweet.
An address associated with the person/group that launched the Wormhole protocol sent an on-chain message offering the hacker a $10 million reward agreement for details of the exploit and the return of the stolen wETH.
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.
