Hyperbridge Exploit Losses Hit $2.5M, Ten Times The Initial Estimate

Hyperbridge postmortem raises cross-chain bridge exploit losses to $2.5 million (Image: Shutterstock)
Hyperbridge postmortem raises cross-chain bridge exploit losses to $2.5 million (Image: Shutterstock)

Hyperbridge now estimates losses from this week's cross-chain bridge exploit at roughly $2.5 million, more than ten times its original figure of $237,000.

Hyperbridge Revises DOT Exploit

The team behind the Polkadot (DOT) to Ethereum (ETH) bridge disclosed the revised total in a Thursday postmortem.

Hyperbridge said an attacker exploited a flaw in its Merkle Mountain Range proof verification logic.

The intruder drained about 245 ETH, worth roughly $561,000, from a TokenGateway contract before the second phase began.

About an hour later, a forged cross-chain message let the attacker mint 1 billion bridged DOT and dump them into thin liquidity. Three other connected chains, Base, Arbitrum and BNB Chain, were also hit, contradicting the original report that only wrapped DOT on Ethereum was affected.

"Our initial public estimate of the realized loss was approximately $237,000, based on the immediately observable sell-off of bridged DOT on Ethereum," the team wrote. "That figure did not capture the full picture, we later learned."

Also Read: World Liberty Financial Demands Insiders Burn 10% Of Their WLFI Or Stay Locked

Recovery Outlook, BRIDGE Token

Stolen funds have been traced to a deposit address on Binance, and Hyperbridge said it has engaged the exchange's compliance team and law enforcement.

The firm warned that a realistic timeline for meaningful recovery could stretch from months to a year. Bridging functions on all four affected chains remain paused until a patch is deployed and audited.

If direct repayment fails, Hyperbridge said it is committed to a structured BRIDGE token allocation to cover residual losses. That backstop looks strained, however.

BRIDGE last traded around $0.006 on Mar. 29, with 24-hour volume near $1,800 and a market cap close to $858,000, CoinGecko data showed. That valuation covers only about a third of the revised $2.5 million shortfall.

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Steven Zeiler

Steven Zeiler is Chief Evangelist at Yellow, working with builders to create real-time, non-custodial trading infrastructure using the Yellow SDK. A programmer, technologist, and entrepreneur, he previously worked for Ripple, where he helped architect peer-to-peer interbank payment prototypes and contributed to decentralizing the XRP Ledger through consensus tracking software.

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Hyperbridge Exploit Losses Hit $2.5M, Ten Times The Initial Estimate | Yellow