Nomad Bridge Hackers Send Back $9 Million

One day after the cross-chain bridge’s vulnerability was exploited for $190.38 million, hackers transferred $9 million back to Nomad.

PeckShield, a blockchain security business, reported that $9 million, or around 4.75 percent of the entire loss, had so far been recovered.

In a tweet sent out at 4:05 UTC, the protocol, which let users move tokens from Ethereum to other chains like Evmos and Moonbeam, pleaded with “white hat hackers” and “ethical researchers” to refund assets.

Stablecoins made up the majority of the returned money, with $3.78 million USDC and $2 million USDT coming from numerous addresses.

Nomad Bridge exploited for $190 million

Nomad, a cross-chain token bridge, was used to drain approximately $200 million in assets. Recognizing this, the Nomad team issued a statement stating that it is attempting to identify the accounts implicated as well as track and recover the monies.

According to DefiLlama, the protocol has been emptied of nearly $190 million in cryptocurrency, leaving just $651.5 in the wallet.

“A vulnerability in the bridge contract allowed it to accept arbitrary root hashes, allowing several entities to withdraw large amounts of assets. Currently, Nomad is paused, so users cannot withdraw their ERC20 wrapped assets from Evmos back to Ethereum.”

Online investigators blame the platform’s defective smart contracts. One such expert, a researcher at cryptocurrency investing firm Paradigm, described how a recent change to one of Nomad’s smart contracts made it an easy target for exploiters to fake transactions.

In what has been dubbed a “decentralized theft,” a flaw in Nomad’s software allowed numerous people to steal the money they didn’t possess simply by copying and pasting a script.

According to reports, some people took advantage of their smart contract by using public wallet addresses that are intended to be traceable. Many people returned the cash. Others claimed to be working in good faith and returned the payments while promising to safeguard the smart contract.

Nomad enables users to transfer and receive tokens across many blockchains. The most recent occurrence has raised severe concerns about the safety of cross-chain bridges.