theblock.co
According to a series of etherscan transaction records, an attacker has exploited Wormhole, a bridge between the Ethereum and Solana blockchains, for close to $256 million in ETH.
Wormhole is a bridging protocol that enables assets to move across various blockchain protocols. When a user sends assets from one chain to another, the bridge locks the assets and mints a wrapped version of the funds on the destination chain. It is not yet clear how the attacker executed the exploit, but it resulted in the theft of 93,750 ETH, worth about $256 million at current prices.
This is one of the largest exploits of a decentralized finance protocol to date.
Wormhole tweeted that the platform is down for maintenance as it investigates the attack and will provide updates via its Twitter account. An address associated with the Wormhole deployer sent an on-chain message offering the attacker a whitehat agreement with a bug bounty of $10 million for the details of the exploit and return of the wETH minted in the attack.