Harmony Protocol Loses $100M to Cross-Chain Horizon Bridge Hack
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Harmony's Hacker Identified
On Friday, Harmony announced in a tweet the hack of its Horizon bridge and that it has "begun working with national authorities and forensic specialists to identify the culprit and retrieve the stolen funds." The team also said the hack did not impact the trustless Bitcoin bridge as funds and assets are stored on decentralized vaults and are considered "safe at this time."
In a later tweet update on Thursday, Harmony’s team said it had identified the hacker’s wallet address. The address has a balance of roughly 85,837 ether or around $97 million at the time of writing.
Horizon enables cross-chain transfers of digital assets between Ethereum and Harmony, as well as BSC, via a set of smart contracts deployed across those three chains. Users holding assets including stablecoins, ERC-20 tokens, or Binance’s BEP-20 tokens can exchange them for corresponding assets on Harmony for a 1:1 ratio.
Crypto Industry Continues Facing Exploits
Harmony's Horizon hack is the latest in a string of hacks against protocols, bridges, and projects including a $20 million theft from Ethereum scaling solution Optimism earlier this month.
Similarly, in February, there was a $320 million hack against Solana bridge Wormhole. Ethereum-linked sidechain Ronin Network used for blockchain game Axie Infinity also suffered a hack in April with a whopping $620 million stolen.
