$200 Million Was Stolen in One of the 'Most Chaotic Hacks' the Crypto World Has Seen Crypto platform Nomad suffered a massive breach on Monday.
By Emily Rella
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Another massive hack has shaken the crypto world amid what's been dubbed the season of the "crypto winter."
An estimated $200 million was stolen from crypto startup Nomad, a platform that allows users to move and trade tokens between the blockchains Avalanche, Ethereum, Evmos, Moonbeam, and Milkomedia C1.
"We are working around the clock to address the situation and have notified law enforcement and retained leading firms for blockchain intelligence and forensics," Nomad told users via Twitter early Tuesday morning. "Our goal is to identify the accounts involved and to trace and recover the funds."
It was not disclosed whether or not customers would be reimbursed if the funds were not recovered, though Nomad did say that it would provide further instruction via Twitter in what's being called one of the "most chaotic hacks that Web3 has ever seen."
Though it's unclear how specifically the cyberattack occurred, it seems to have begun with a change to the platform's code.
Nomad is known in the crypto world as a Bridge, which allows users to transfer tokens from one blockchain to another by locking them up in what's called a "smart contract" on the first chain before they are transferred over.
According to Twitter user and crypto researcher @samczsun, the update to Nomad's smart contract code allowed hackers to start pulling money from Nomad that wasn't actually theirs.
"A routine upgrade marked the zero hash as a valid root, which had the effect of allowing messages to be spoofed on Nomad," the researcher wrote on Twitter. "Attackers abused this to copy/paste transactions and quickly drained the bridge in a frenzied free-for-all."
CoinDesk noted that attacks on crypto Bridges have become more common recently since many users have indicated an interest in moving their coins from one blockchain to another.
Earlier this summer, crypto Horizon lost over $100 million to hackers. Horizon is a Bridge that allows users to move coins from Ethereum to the Binance Smart Chain.
In April, a Bridge called Ronin lost a whopping $450 million worth of crypto in an attack on its services.
The series of hacks on Bridges show just one side of the dangers in the world of decentralized finance, leaving many to wonder how, without regulations, there will ever be a feeling of security when dealing with cryptocurrency.
