Jump Trading group literally jumped in to get Wormhole back on track and restore the missing funds from the recent hack worth $320 million in wrapped Ethereum as we reported in our Ethereum news.
A wormhole is a popular cross-chain crypto bridge between Ethereum, Avalanche, Solana, and others and it got hacked a day ago out of $320 million in wrapped Ethereum. However, today, Jump Trading Group helped to restore the lost funds. wETH in Wormhole is crypto pegged to the price of ETH but interoperable with other networks so to create wETH, the users have to first stake Ethereum.
The wormhole network is down for maintenance as we look into a potential exploit.
We will provide updates here as soon as we have them.
Thank you for your patience.
— Wormhole
(@wormholecrypto) February 2, 2022
The Wormhole team announced that the funds were all restored and Wormhole is back up now. They said that they managed to fix the vulnerability right after midnight UTC and all wETH are now backed up 1:1. Jump Trading Group has a stake in Wormhole’s development and it took credit for replacing the 120,000 in ETH taken. Blockchain analytics site Ellitpic concluded that the exploit was due to the failure of the platform to validate the guardian accounts and resulted in the attacker being able to mint 120,000 wETH with no ETH backing it.
The hacker then managed to exchange 93,750 wETH for ETH and changed the remainder for Solana that they left untouched in the Solana wallet. Wormhole then sent a message to the attacker and it said:
“This is the Wormhole Deployer: We noticed you were able to exploit the Solana VAA verification and mint tokens. We d [sic] like to offer you a whitehat agreement, and present you a bug bounty of $10 million for exploit details, and returning the wETH you’ve minted.”
.@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
(@JumpCryptoHQ) February 3, 2022
Half an hour later, the team tweeted that the platform was down for maintenance as they are looking into a potential exploit. Wormhole broke the news of the explicit and added that ETH will be added in the next hours to ensure that wETH is backed 1:1. more details would come shortly after showing that the attacks on cross-chain bridges are multiplying as more blockchains are becoming popular. The cross-chain bridge in DEFI protocol Qubit was also hacked for $80 million.
Wormhole allows users of one chain to take wrapped assets and use them on another chain so often they can take advantage of the lower fees or different applications on other networks. To get the ETH into Solana, users have to lock it into a smart contract and get an equivalent amount of wrapped Ethereum.
