Horizon Bridge Hack | Lizard Token (?) | dYdX on Cosmos | Exploits across DeFi & More!

Last Week In The Multi-Chain Ecosystem (20th to 26th June 2022)

The Cross-Chain Insider

Bridge Updates

1) Harmony’s Horizon Bridge Hacked 🤐

Horizon Bridge, Harmony’s native (official) bridge, was exploited for $100 million. The team found that private keys were compromised, leading to the breach of Horizon bridge, and funds were stolen from the Ethereum side of the bridge. The hacker swapped $100m in altcoins for ETH.

2) Synapse Integrates Klaytn 🤝🏻

Synapse has integrated Klaytn, a public blockchain focused on the metaverse, gamefi, and the creator economy. The launch will allow users to seamlessly bridge assets between Klaytn and all Synapse-supported blockchains. Synapse will support bridging for USDC/USDT/DAI/ETH/wBTC between Klaytn and other chains when Klap Finance launches.

3) LI.FI’s Lizard Token? 🤔

Speculation around LI.FI’s Lizard tokens launching during Arbitrum Odyssey’s bridge week intensifies as snoopers identity a new repository called lizard-token on LI.FI’s GitHub page.

4) Biconomy’s Hyphen now Supports Optimism 🔴

Hyphen, Biconomy’s bridging protocol, has added support for Optimism — a low-cost and lightning-fast Ethereum L2 blockchain. Users can now use Hyphen to bridge to Optimism in a quick and secure manner. LPs can earn an APY for adding ETH or USDC to Optimism within the Hyphen pools tab.

5) Ronin Bridge Re-Opening on June 28th 👏🏻

The Ronin team has announced that the Ronin Bridge, which was subject to one of the biggest bridge exploits in history a few months ago, will re-open on June 28th with all user funds returned. Re-opening will require a Ronin hard-fork which means all validators must update their software.

6) On-Chain Polygon and Solana Txs on Coinbase 🥳

Coinbase has added support for on-chain Polygon and Solana transactions, making it faster, easier, and cheaper for users to send/receive ETH, MATIC, and USDC on Polygon and USDC on Solana.

Multi-Chain Ecosystem Updates

1) Inverse Finance Exploit 🧐

Inverse Finance, a lending protocol, was subject to an oracle price manipulation incident. The exploit resulted in a loss of $5.83 million in DOLA, with the attacker earning a total of $1.2 million.

2) USDD Depeg 😳

USDD, Tron DAO’s algo-stable has been depegged, trading around the $0.96-0.97 levels. On June 19th, it depegged around 8%, causing many to relate it to the UST/Terra situation.

3) Uniswap Acquires Genie 🦄

Uniswap has acquired Genie, an NFT marketplace aggregator, to expand its product offering to include both ERC-20s and NFTs. Uniswap will soon enable buying/selling NFTs on its interface.

4) dYdX V4 on Cosmos 🤔

dYdX, a derivative trading protocol, announced that its V4 upgrade would be launched as a standalone Cosmos-based blockchain based on the Cosmos SDK and Tendermint PoS Consensus protocol.

5) Solana on Mobile 📱

Solana Labs has launched the Solana Mobile Stack (SMS), a toolkit that allows devs to build beautiful, seamless web3 mobile experiences. It provides a new set of libraries for wallets and apps, allowing developers to create mobile apps on Solana. A crypto-native Solana phone is expected to be shipped in Q1 2023.

6) DNX Attacks on Convex and Ribbon 🕵️

Convex and Ribbon were subject to a DNS attack where the hackers hijacked the domain of both projects and attempted to phish users to approve malicious smart contracts.

7) Tether launches GBP₮ 👏🏻

Tether has launched GBPT, Tether tokens pegged to the British Pound Sterling. GBP₮ will launch in early July on Ethereum.

What’s Popping on Twitter?

by Mark Murdock

Horizon Bridge, which links Harmony with Ethereum and Binance Chain, lost $100 million to a hack on Thursday. 

Based on a tweet thread from Harmony founder Stephen Tse, the hack did not occur due to a smart contract bug or Hor platform issue. Instead, it was the private keys from the Ethereum side of the bridge that were exploited. 

Here’s how:

The Harmony team has yet to come out with an explanation for how the hack occurred. That being said, on-chain analyst and security researcher Mudit Gupta theorized that Horizen funds were drained due to two compromised hot wallet addresses that were used to sign illegitimate transactions in a system that, as Mudit described, “was essentially a 2 of 5 multisig.” Notably, Mudit said that the hack was “eerily similar to how Ronin was hacked” and that “this was not a ‘blockchain hack’. It was a ‘traditional hack”.

As of Sunday night, the Harmony team has yet to uncover the identity of the hacker, though they did offer a $1 million bug bounty for the return of the Horizon funds and the sharing of how the attacker pulled off the exploit. As the hacker remains silent, Harmony has begun working with multiple cyber security partners, exchanges, and the FBI to identify the culprit. 

For now, the hacker holds $105 million worth of assets in their address on Ethereum. 

According to data collected from Rekt, the hack is the tenth-largest in crypto history. Notably, it is the fourth largest bridge-related loss behind Ronin ($624 million), Poly Network ($611 million), and Wormhole ($326 million). All told, with Horizon’s exploit, over $1.6 billion worth of assets have been affected by hacks stemming from bridging solutions.

Interesting Reads

1) Trail of Bits Research Report: Are Blockchains Decentralized

Trail of Bits @trailofbits

For the last year, a 9-person team from @trailofbits has deeply studied the security of blockchains for @DARPA. Today, our analysis and tools are public: blog.trailofbits.com/2022/06/21/are…

2) IBC: A Core Primitive for Interchain Native Products

Interchain Foundation @interchain_io

IBC acts as a basic primitive allowing different blockchains to communicate. Read this blog post to learn more about the goal of IBC in relation to interoperability and what the Cosmos network is doing to make this primitive fundamental:

interchain-io.medium.comIBC: A Core Primitive for Interchain Native ProductsThe birth of Bitcoin led to a Cambrian explosion of blockchains with different design principles and use cases. While these distributed…

3) What Makes a Good Chain to Build on

Luke Saunders ✦ 🔴 @lukedelphi

We've been talking a lot internally about what makes a good chain to build on. Builders determine which ecosystems prosper. Seeing things through their eyes helps predict where the space will be in a couple of years. I've summarised into a thread to collect thoughts.

4) ELI5 dYdX: Why Cosmos?

Coinhall 🌕 📈 🔄 @coinhall_org

Decentralized crypto exchange @dYdX announced yesterday that they would be expanding to their sovereign blockchain on #Cosmos in their v4 update, away from StarkEx. In the write-up below, we looked into the plausible reasons for ‘Why Cosmos?’ bit.ly/3nbqteZ

5) Solana vs Ethereum

nathan.eth @nathanweb3

1/ solana poses a large and growing threat to ethereum. you’re wrong if you believe otherwise bc “haha VC chain offline”. i can explain why - after following both ecosystems closely for years and talking to 100s of devs & users. i want the EVM to win. but i’m also not blind.

6) Explore Celo by Swapping with LI.FI

LI.FI - Powers any cross-chain strategy (🦎,🦎) @lifiprotocol

Celo is a layer 1 smart-contract platform, focused on the deployment of dApps on mobile devices. 📱 Read now to learn how you can start exploring @CeloOrg ecosystem by bridging your assets through transferto.xyz 👇 blog.li.fi/explore-celo-b…

blog.li.fiExplore Celo By Swapping With LI.FILI.FI Interoperability Expands To Celo

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