After trying to rectify the recent drop, Solana’s prices have taken another hit. The price of Solana is now dropping again after a bridge connecting Solana to Ethereum was hacked. This resulted in a loss 120000 wrapped ETH worth $320 million.
Solana trades at $98.45 and has dropped 9.42% in 24 hours. Its current trading price is $98.45, which is 62.15% lower than its November 6, 2021 all-time high of $260.
SOL’s current market cap stands at $30.9 billion. It has a current circulating supply 314.8 million SOL coins, and a 24-hour trading volume of $3.2 Billion.
Wormhole Bridge hack
New reports indicate that the Wormhole Bridge suffered a hacking attack in the early hours on February 3, according to new reports.
Solana Team reports that the hack resulted a loss of approximately 120,000 wrapped Ethereum coins, which is a staggering $320 million. The hack was over, and the team announced that Ethereum (ETH), which is a cryptocurrency, would be added to the bridge in order to fully back any wrapped ETH that may be found on the Bridge, will be done.
120k wETH was earned by exploiting the wormhole network.
To ensure that wETH is fully supported, ETH will be added in the coming hours. More information will be available shortly.
We are doing our best to bring the network back online quickly. We appreciate your patience.
— Wormhole🌪 (@wormholecrypto) February 2, 2022
Wormhole however, has already confirmed that the problem was resolved and that the vulnerability is fixed. They are currently working to bring the network back online.
The Wormhole developers offered a bug bounty to the exploit details. They stated:
“We noticed that you were able to exploit the Solana VAA verification and mint tokens. We would like to offer you a whitehat agreement, and present you a bug bounty of $10 million for exploit details, and returning the wETH you have minted.”
This hack brings out the vulnerability in DeFi protocols. The co-founder of Elliptic Tom Robinson’s blockchain analysis company, Elliptic, stated:
“This demonstrates once again that the security of DeFi services has not reached a level that is appropriate for the huge sums being stored within them. The transparency of the blockchain is allowing attackers to identify and exploit major bugs.”
Solana’s endless woes
The bridge hack is the latest in the growing list of Solana’s unending problems. The first was January’s four-day span of network outages. Then, this hack.
This hack occurred at a moment when Solana was ready to correct the market price drop of SOL caused by network congestions. It now complicates issues for the network taunted as an “Ethereum Killer.”
Samczsun (a paradigm security researcher) started by first determining if the attack started on Ethereum, or Solana.
From Samczsun’s research, there were only two possible routes that the hacker(s) could have used. They exploited the bridge to get the private keys. He also claimed that there was a corresponding Solana transaction where the hacker bridged the ETH, without depositing them, by exploiting a vulnerability called mint wETH. The attacker provided an encrypted VM with valid signatures.
What was the secret to this success? @wormholecrypto exploit work? I joined forces @gf_256 @ret2jazzyIt was possible to reverse engineer the exploit. Now that it has been fixed, we are able to share it with all of you👇 pic.twitter.com/lXwD0GLZ3N
— samczsun (@samczsun) February 3, 2022
