While cross-chain solutions are popular, there are still many risks to their use. Recently, the popular Solana Wormhole fell victim to a $200 million hack. That’s about 80,000 Wrapped ETH.
According to Etherscan, this amount of money was transferred to the hacker’s wallet. What’s more, this means that large amounts of ETH and Solana blockchains are now unbacked.
Developers Are Negotiating With Hackers
Solana developers are now negotiating with hackers as they noticed the vulnerability in the VAA verification and the theft of mint tokens. The Wormhole Deployer offers a whitehat agreement, where the hacker would get to keep $10 million, or 4.7% of the money, and return the rest.
The Wormhole website is currently deactivated.
Additionally, Vitalik Buterin, the Ethereum founder, recently tweeted about the risks of cross-chain bridges. He stated he opposes using these solutions on Ethereum and other blockchains because of increased attack vectors on bridges and assets.
Buterin noted there are fundamental limits to the security of bridges that hop across zones of sovereignty. With these limitations, the funds are transferred via multiple chains and decentralized applications with a higher chance of being stolen.
On the other hand, Vitalik supported multi-chain solutions.