The attacker exploited a vulnerability in Polkadot interoperability protocol Hyperbridge, minting over ~$2 billion in DOT and other tokens, but was only successfully able to cash out about $237K.
Polkadot confirmed on Monday, April 13, that an exploit occurred on Hyperbridge’s Ethereum gateway contract. The Polkadot team stated that native DOT and the broader Polkadot ecosystem remain fully secure and unaffected by the incident.
Hyperbridge also confirmed the exploit in an X post this morning and said that it has paused bridging “while the team contains the issue.”
CertiK first flagged the exploit, reporting that the attacker had minted 1 billion DOT, worth about $1.17 billion at current prices, but only successfully cashed out about $237K.
Hyperbridgeis a cross-chain interoperability protocol built on Polkadot. The exploit was isolated to the Ethereum-side gateway contract and did not compromise the integrity of the Polkadot network itself, its parachains, and native DOT on Polkadot, per Polkadot’s X post.
According to a detailed report from on-chain analyst Verso, the attacker didn’t only target DOT, but was able to mint multiple other wrapped assets on Hyperbridge, including another approximately $1 billion in ARGN, as well as MANTA and CERE.
The incident comes just two weeks after Hyperbridge posted an April Fool’s joke announcement that it had been hacked ”We’ve been breached We’re working hard to fix this!’“ Today’s announcement of the actual protocol breach opened cheerily with “Bridge update!” prompting numerous comments calling out the project for irresponsible comms.
Sources: Polkadot, Hyperbridge
Disclaimer: This is a developing story and will be updated when more information is available.
This article was generated automatically by The Defiant’s AI news system from publicly available sources.
