Wormhole Plugs $320 Million Gap Following Hack

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• Wormhole has plugged the $320 million gap left by this week’s hack
• The Ethereum-Solana bridge has added 120,000 ETH to its coffers to cover the shortfall
• Some have claimed that Wormhole developers posted about the exploit on GitHub prior to the hack

Wormhole has plugged the $320 million gap left by the hacker who this week tricked the protocol into minting 120,000 ETH on the Solana blockchain. While the source of the new funds has naturally not been publicized, is it more than likely that Wormhole’s backers, which include FTX, will have stumped up the cash. Wormhole has promised to publish its own post-mortem on the hack in the coming days, but given the amount of almost identical explanations that have been doing the rounds since the event took place it probably doesn’t need to.

Wormhole Backers Stump Up The Cash

Wormhole dominated the crypto news agenda on Wednesday when the 120,000 ETH was minted on the beleaguered Solana network before being sent back to the Ethereum blockchain in the form of wETH. The hacker was approached with a $10 million reward offer but there has been no communication since, although the funds themselves still have not left the hackers’ wallet.

Wormhole promised that the 120,000 wETH gap would be plugged the same day that the exploit was discovered and it has been good to its word:

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All funds have been restored and Wormhole is back up.

We’re deeply grateful for your support and thank you for your patience.

— Wormhole🌪 (@wormholecrypto) February 3, 2022

With Wormhole being backed by the very wealthy FTX group as well as other deep-pocketed VCs, it was clearly pretty easy to find the funds to fill the hole left by the hacker.

Did Devs Post the Exploit on GitHub?

The fallout of the hack has focused on the Solana blockchain and Wormhole developers, with some suggesting that Wormhole devs posted about the potential exploit on GitHub weeks before it was taken advantage of, with the attacker simply reverse engineering it:

Hahahahaha!!! The $320 Million $ETH #Wormhole hack…. The devs had posted a PR to fix the exploit WEEKS ago and just never deployed it…

Someone reads the PR, reverse engineered it, got $320 million in $ETH!

Talk about #securityTheater! :O https://t.co/MVVrTJux2S

— Theodore R. Smith (@hopeseekr) February 4, 2022

Wormhole is yet to address these accusations which, without evidence, are so far just that.