Crypto news: SOL dips following $320m hacker attack
Updated
The price of solana (SOL) tumbled on Thursday after hackers attacked Wormhole, a bridge between the Solana and Ethereum networks, and stole more than 120,000 wrapped ether (wETH) worth around $320m.
Solana fell more than 14% taking its price down to $94.65 by mid-morning in London.
Wormhole is a communication bridge that connects Solana to other decentralised finance (DeFi) networks that allows users to transfer cryptocurrencies between a number of blockchains without using decentralised exchanges.
Originally built on Solana as a bi-directional bridge for Solana and Ethereum cross-transfers, Wormhole now also supports transfers between Binance Smart Chain, Polygon, Terra, Avalanche and Oasis ecosystems.
On Wednesday, an on-chain analyst, tweeting under the nickname ‘samczsun’, posted a message from the Wormhole team to a hacker, which was attached to a transaction block.
The tweet read: “This is the Wormhole Deployer: We noticed you were able to exploit the Solana VAA verification and mint tokens. We’d like to offer you a whitehat agreement, and present you a bug bounty of $10m for exploit details, and returning the wETH you’ve minted. You can reach out to us at contact@certus.one.”
Chart of the day: SOL and ETH slump after hacker attack
Solana (SOL) fell 7%, while ether (ETH) was down 3.5% – Credit: TradingViewWormhole then issued a tweet that it was investigating a potential exploit.
‼️ The wormhole network is down for maintenance as we look into a potential exploit.
— Wormhole???? (@wormholecrypto) February 2, 2022
???? We will provide updates here as soon as we have them.
???? Thank you for your patience.
Following the attack, some $360 worth of ETH was not backed, and Wormhole said that it would add the amount to the system over the following hours to ensure that ETH was backed 1:1 to fiat currency.
The wormhole network was exploited for 120k wETH.
— Wormhole???? (@wormholecrypto) February 2, 2022
ETH will be added over the next hours to ensure wETH is backed 1:1. More details to come shortly.
We are working to get the network back up quickly. Thanks for your patience.
It was the second biggest DeFi attack to date since last April, when cross-chain protocol PolyNetwork was hacked for $611m.
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Quote of the day
Jack Dorsey, former chief executive of Twitter and founder and CEO of Square, speaking to CNBC:
Top coins by market capitalisation
As of 07:00 GMT:
- bitcoin (BTC) fell 3.42% to $36,977
- ether (ETH) was down 3.59% and trading at $2,653
- binance coin (BNB) was trading at $367.68 – 3.52% below its price 24 hours ago
Winners and losers
- quant (QNT) added a whopping 24.29% over the last 24 hours (and 35.42% over the last week). It is now 58th biggest cryptocurrency by market capitalisation.
- solana (SOL), the seventh biggest virtual token by market capitalisation, lost 14% over the last 24 hours - more than any other top 50 coin in the period.
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