Hackers have carted away $100 million in cryptocurrencies from Horizon, a blockchain bridge, in the latest significant theft in the crypto industry.
Although there are currently few details about the incident available, Harmony, the company behind Horizon, claims to have discovered the theft on Wednesday morning.
Blockchain bridges are important in the DeFi space because they provide users with a mechanism to move their assets between blockchains. Users can transfer tokens from the Ethereum network to the Binance Smart Chain using Horizon. According to Harmony, a separate bridge for bitcoin was unaffected by the hack.
Bridges, like other aspects of DeFi, which aspires to replicate services rendered by traditional financial institutions like loans and investments on the blockchain, are now a primary target for hackers.
According to Jess Symington, research director at Elliptic, a company that analyzes blockchains, bridges keep substantial liquidity stocks, making them a target for hackers.
According to Symington, for people to use bridges to transfer money, assets must be locked on one blockchain and unlocked or minted on another. As a result, these bridges hold substantial amounts of cryptoassets.
Harmony hasn’t gone into detail about how the money was stolen.
However, one investor expressed concerns about the Horizon bridge’s security as early as April.
A “multisig” wallet that only required two signatures to initiate transactions was critical to the Horizon bridge’s security.
According to analysts, the issue arose as a result of a “private key compromise,” in which hackers obtained the password or other information required to access a cryptocurrency wallet.
This hack comes after several attacks on other blockchain bridges. Ronin Network, which powers the cryptocurrency game Axie Infinity, lost over $600 million in a security breach in March. Wormhole, another well-known bridge, also lost more than $320 million in a separate hack a month earlier.
The theft adds to the recent barrage of negative news about cryptocurrency. Babel Finance and Celsius froze withdrawals after experiencing a severe liquidity shortage due to a significant decline in the value of their assets.
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