Even when the crypto investors started to heave sigh of relief on the seeming recovery of crypto markets, the news of another scam involving $100 million has come like bolt from the blue. This time Harmony Protocol, claiming itself to be a crypto bridge company, stated in a tweet that a theft of $100 million approx. worth of Ethereum and other tokens has occurred and they were trying to retrieve the money back.
Harmony’s Horizon provides bridging services to facilitate cross-chain transfer of funds with Ethereum, Binance and 3 other chains. The bridging services for cross-chain transfer has to be fully secure. But hackers got successful in breaking through the secure system touted to be usp of blockchain based crypto transactions.
And this is not the first such case. Earlier, scammers were able to breach security protocols of other bridging companies. Hackers stole almost $620 million of crypto tokens from Axie Infinity’s Ronin network bridge.
According to some report, the bridging is particularly vulnerable to hacking as they are run by anonymous teams. However, if anonymity is the cause of vulnerability of cross-chain transfer based on bridging, then whole of crypto world is promoted on the virtues of anonymity involved in crypto transactions.
On the other hand, Harmony Protocol’s founder and CEO, Stephen Tse announced via tweet that there was no breach in their code smart contracts and their blockchain system remained secure.
Stephen further said that the team has found evidence that some private keys were compromised which led to the breach of their Horizon bridge.
Harmony has, in another tweet has announced a bounty of $1 million for return and information leading to recovery of stolen funds. It has also committed not to press criminal charges if funds are returned.
Crypto market is already sitting on the edge due to precipitous fall from valuations of $3 trillion to below $1 trillion within a year. The frequent reports of scams and hacking in crypto world are going to push it down faster.
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