How Harmony Bridge Bug Gifted Users $2.2 Million in ONE Tokens

  beincrypto.com 2 h

There is reportedly a software bug in the smart contract code for the Harmony cross-chain bridge. The exploit caused almost 150 million ONE tokens ($2.2 million) to be wrongly sent to 79 user addresses.

One of the recipients, Aaron Li, alerted the Harmony team on December 7, 2023, and sold 16.4 million ONE tokens ($260,000). The Harmony team engineer Gardiner accused Li of withholding and delaying his disclosure of information.

How ONE Token Bug Adds to Harmony Hacks

The team plans to burn the wrongly minted tokens to avoid affecting the asset’s supply. The team has not yet announced a potential remedy date.

Crypto users use bridges to move tokens between blockchains. They lock their original assets in a smart contract. The smart contract then mints the equivalent value of those tokens in a way a new blockchain can understand.

Bridges have been vulnerable to hacks, with a previous Harmony hack losing over $100 million users. Famous North Korean hacking group Lazarus was found to be behind the $100 million hack in 2022. Sky Mavis’ Ronin bridge was exploited for $over $600 million in 2022.

Initial Estimation of Harmony Fund Movement | Source: PeckShield

Ronin hackers used fake job offers to get an employee of Sky Mavis to click on a document. The click compromised their computer and infiltrated nine nodes to validate transactions.

Crypto sleuth ZachXBT revealed that funds from the hack went to several exchanges this past weekend. Funds were moved from TornadoCash to several crypto exchanges.

“North Korea’s Lazarus Group had a very busy weekend moving $63.5m (~41,000 ETH) from the Harmony bridge hack through Railgun before consolidating funds and depositing on three different exchanges…Seems Binance and Huobi froze a portion of the funds. “

Analysis Reveals Bullish Prospects for ONE Price

The price of the ONE token is currently $0.01602929. It is up 0.7% in the last 24 hours.

ONE Technical Analysis | Source: TradingView

ONE has fallen under a descending resistance trend line since August 2022. During this time, the price has made numerous failed breakout attempts (red icons). The most recent occurred in the final week of 2023.