The recent crisis in Blockchain security may have come as a shock to many because Blockchain technology is expected to be very secure and hack Free.
However, it won’t be surprising to Ethereum (ETH) co-founder Vitalik Buterin, who in January foresaw the danger and sounded an alarm.
Buterin in January warned that the security of cross-chain bridges would be vulnerable to a 51% attack.
So far this year, the crypto industry has recorded 9 major hacks, starting from January 20, 2022, to the most recent one on August 2nd, 2022.
All these hacks share one thing in common: they prey on the vulnerabilities of these chains.
However, there was no major hack recorded in May 2022.
The first hack to be recorded in 2022 was that of a cross-chain bridge, Multichain, that was hacked and experienced a loss of over 3 million dollars.
The bridge to record the most losses so far is the Ronin bridge which was hacked on March 30th, 2022, and recorded a loss of 650 million dollars.
The most recent one is the attack on the Nomad bridge on August 2nd, 2022. The attack was one of a kind because it was not carried out by a single individual or group.
Instead, after the original hacker penetrated and stole the funds, he left an open path for other people to easily grab the stolen funds.
It was quite disastrous because the bridge lost over 200 million dollars in a matter of hours.
The warning sign Vitalik gave about the vulnerability of cross-chain bridges has materialised.
Just 7 months after he sounded the alarm, a lot of chains have fallen victim to major hacks, starting from January when he made the warning.
With the situation, it’s pretty obvious that Vitalik’s hunch was right and the next step now is for cross-chain bridge companies to find a solution to the problem, or else it may result in a catastrophe worse than what we are seeing now.
