A hacker stole about $100 million during an attack on the Horizon cross-chain bridge of the Harmony protocol

The team of the Harmony blockchain platform reported an attack on the Horizon cross-chain bridge, as a result of which an attacker stole assets worth about $ 100 million.

The unknown person withdrew the tokens in several transactions, then sent them to another wallet and exchanged them on the Uniswap decentralized exchange.

Horizon is a cross-chain bridge between the Harmony blockchain and the Bitcoin, Ethereum and BNB Chain networks.

Representatives of Harmony suspended the work of Horizon. They also stated that they had launched an investigation together with law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, and notified cryptocurrency exchanges about the situation.

The team assured that the incident did not affect the trustless bridge for bitcoin – all funds are safe in decentralized repositories.

Against the background of hacking, the Harmony (ONE) token fell by 9.4% per day. At the time of writing, its cost is about $0.024, according to Coingecko.

Recall that in February, hackers withdrew more than $319 million from the Wormhole cross-chain bridge pool based on Solana, and also stole about $4.3 million in bitcoin and Ethereum from the DeFi company Meter.

In March, during an attack on the Ronin sidechain, an attacker stole crypto assets worth about $625 million.

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin has previously stated that he is “pessimistic” about cross-chain bridges. In his opinion, the latter are vulnerable to attacks like 51%.

According to Immunefi estimates, in the first quarter of 2022 alone, crypto projects lost more than $1.22 billion as a result of the actions of hackers and scammers.