The Nomad bridge hack has sent shockwaves through the crypto community, culminating in a loss of approximately $190 million.
The recent attack on the Nomad bridge has wreaked havoc, with hackers managing to siphon off nearly all available funds—leading to a total loss of $190.7 million, as reported.
The first sign of trouble occurred at 11:30 PM CET when hackers snatched away 100 wrapped Bitcoin, valued at about $2.3 million, from the Nomad bridge. Just two hours later, Nomad confirmed via social media that a breach had occurred. In addition to wrapped Bitcoin, the attackers also made off with wrapped Ether (wETH), USDC, and DAI.
Interestingly, during the hack, numerous wallets were receiving significant transfers from the bridge, with many amounts exceeding one million USDC appearing quite systematically. Some of the users involved were classified as 'white hats'—they acted quickly to withdraw funds in an effort to safeguard them, returning what they could once the chaos subsided. However, those who extracted funds post-breach could realistically keep what they took. sources Nomad operates as a cross-chain bridge protocol, facilitating token transfers across incompatible blockchains. The platform specifically allows transactions between networks such as ETH, AVAX, EVMOS, and GLMR.
Bridges work by locking tokens in smart contracts and then 'wrapping' them for use on different chains. If a smart contract associated with the original tokens is breached, the wrapped versions lose their backing, leading to a total loss of value. This exact scenario unfolded with the Nomad bridge.
This incident couldn't have come at a worse time for Nomad, as just the previous week, they had participated in a seed funding round with prominent investors like Coinbase Ventures, OpenSea, Polygon, Crypto.com, Wintermute, and Gnosis, reaching a company valuation of $225 million.
Decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols, especially bridges, maintain large pools of liquidity, making them prime targets for cybercriminals. For context, the Ronin Network, which powers the popular Play-to-Earn game Axie Infinity, was breached in March, leading to the theft of 173,600 ETH and 25.5 million USDC from its bridge. Similarly, Harmony's Horizon bridge was breached this June, resulting in over $100 million in losses. revealed Experts have pointed out key factors contributing to vulnerabilities in crypto bridges:
"Firstly, the sheer number of developers and project personnel can be overwhelming, often leading to the hiring of insufficiently qualified programmers due to a lack of skilled labor in the field.
Dr. Dimitry Mihaylov , Chief Scientific Officer of Farcana \"Secondly, this ties into the problem of insiders—not necessarily hacking, but rather the risk of bribery to leak sensitive information. It can be about common coding errors, even when sound cybersecurity measures are in place.
"Lastly, there's a notable absence of standardized certification practices for blockchain bridges. If certification processes were widely adopted, they could significantly mitigate the issues related to code bugs. Certification within secure jurisdictions could also imply obligations to cover losses through insurance, which would ensure a smoother recovery from breaches.\"
In a devastating breach, Harmony's Horizon bridge lost an astounding $100 million.
Sky Mavis successfully raised $150 million to compensate for the losses incurred from the Ronin Bridge hack.
Read related posts:
Disclaimer
In line with the uk Blum is celebrating a significant milestone, marking one year since they received accolades for 'Best GameFi App' and 'Best Trading App' at the Blockchain Forum 2025.