Wormhole is a project allowing users to "bridge" tokens from one blockchain to another in a 1:1 fashion. A critical vulnerability in the code led to an exploiter draining 120,000 Ether worth over 320 Million USD. Communications with the hacker are ongoing and Jump Trading has agreed to cover the funds.
News that the Wormhole protocol had been compromised arrived when crypto community members alerted their peers on social media that a significant amount of ETH had been drained from the Wormhole bridge. Hours thereafter, the platform confirmed that an attack had taken place and the cross-chain Ethereum-Solana bridge had been exploited.
Exploit worth $320 Million
According to the Wormhole team exactly 120k ETH was drained from the bridge and sent to the exploiters wallet. Their team took down the bridge for maintenance and tried fixing the vulnerability as soon as possible. Still, this left hundreds of millions of wrapped tokens on Solana unbacked.
The wormhole network was exploited for 120k wETH.
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.
— Wormhole (@wormhole) February 2, 2022
This led to Certus One, the company behind Wormhole, covering the funds at their own expense to ensure no liquidation cascades would occur to undercollateralized positions on Solana. Following the exploit, Wormhole has been keen to reach out to whoever executed the hack. In a message recorded on the Ethereum blockchain, the project offered a bug bounty reward of 10 million dollars for the safe return of the funds.
Jump Trading covers funds
Although initially there was no comment on who covered the 320 Million dollars, the parent company Jump Crypto soon took a stand. The subsidiary of Jump Trading, one of the largest algorithmic and high-frequency trading firms in the world, decided to fully cover the exploit with their own funds to support the Solana ecosystem.
.@JumpCryptoHQ believes in a multichain future and that @WormholeCrypto is essential infrastructure. That’s why we replaced 120k ETH to make community members whole and support Wormhole now as it continues to develop.
— Jump Crypto 🔥💃🏻 (@jump_) February 3, 2022
For a long time, Jump Trading was relatively quiet about their involvement in the crypto markets. This first took a turn when the 20 years old firm announced the formal launch of Jump Crypto in September of 2021. Jump's aim was to take an active role in building software infrastructure and tooling for blockchain ecosystems, in addition to being an active participant in trading and market-making activities. The firm formally contributed to Solana projects Pyth Network and Wormhole, among other cross-chain services.
