In only 3 bridge hacks in 2022, crypto investors lost over $1 BILLION DOLLARS. Bridges are one of the most important protocols in blockchain tech. Right now, it’s the ONLY way to move money across chains.
And while being fast and cheap are important things to look for in bridging, nothing is more important than safety. All quality bridges offer all 3 of these things. Today, I have an important topic for you. Where bridges are vulnerable and which bridges are the safest. Plus the only bridge I use with 100% confidence. It’s WanChain.
Bridge Vulnerabilities
Most of us understand at some kind of base level that bridging means we are not just moving assets across chains. We cover bridges extensively here. In many cases, we are locking an asset on one chain like BNB Chain, and minting it and all the relevant data to another chain like Polygon.
Source: Twitter
Some bridges are faster than others, and some are cheaper than others. But like when you cross a bridge in a car when the asset is in transit is when it is vulnerable. So, bridges need constant monitoring and auditing so no bugs end up in their software that can lead to hacks. There are 3 places in the bridge where an exploit can happen. They are:
- The Relayer.
- The Smart Contract.
- The blockchains themselves.
The relayer is the group of network nodes that do the cross-chain transaction. They lock, mint, burn and unlock tokens and ensure that the data moves to the receiving chain. The smart contract and blockchains are self-explanatory. If the contract or the chain is buggy, then you are at risk.
3 Huge Recent Bridge Hacks
Now let’s see what happened with some bridges that weren’t quite so diligent or also a little unlucky:
1) Ronin Bridge
The Ronin bridge hack in late March 2022 was by far the largest last year at approx $600 million. Ronin, for those of you not into games, is the chain Sky Mavis built to run Axie Infinity. The game was so popular it was bogging down the entire Ethereum network.
Source: Twitter
So they created Ronin. It’s an ETH sidechain. That means it shares some properties. But to go from using ETH for gas to Ronin or the 2 Axie game tokens of Axie and Smooth Love Potion a user must bridge from ETH to Ronin. The hack came from exploiting a validator node then leading to a bridge hack and siphoning off of ETH.
To their credit, Sky Mavis did reimburse users for this loss. But the main lesson here is that too few validators at 22 (Ronin is one of the most centralized chains out there) and potential bridge vulnerability is a recipe for disaster.
You can avoid chains that are too centralized by looking up the Nakamoto Coefficient for your favorite chains.
2) Wormhole Bridge
In February 2022, the Wormhole Bridge was hacked for $320 million due to a vulnerability in some contracts on the Solana chain. Jump Trading, who is a big early investor in Solana, reimbursed users to make them whole. That led to a big set of questions on how centralized and how much of a VC chain Solana is that someone outside of Solana would bail out the users.
Source: Bridge
But that’s another topic for another day. So it was a smart contract vulnerability here.
3) Multichain Bridge
The Multichain Bridge has been hacked twice. But in January 2022, it was for $3 million. This hack was due to smart contract issues.
Source: Twitter
Now our favorite bridge, Wanchain, doesn’t have these problems. We are going to explain why in just a second.
The Best Bridge Around
Wanchain is the safest bridge because it always controls the big 3 vulnerabilities. First, Its relayers are called Storeman nodes. Only they can do bridge transactions. And when a bridging transaction takes place, the nodes work together to be the relayer. They all do it together so a hacker can’t target one Storeman node in particular.
Next, its smart contracts are audited regularly and continuously to look for bugs and vulnerabilities. And there are none. Now Wanchain can’t control how secure the blockchains themselves are, but they use only secure chains and many chains including Bitcoin and the EVM chains. No Solana.
And not just that, it’s fast and cheap. With an L2 like Arbitrum, its bridge goes only to Ethereum. But Wanchain’s ETH XFlows let you bypass ETH and go directly from L2 to L2 or L2 to another EVM chain.
Source: Twitter
In fact, the bridging transaction you are watching in the background right is exactly this. The transaction is going from POLYGON directly to Arbitrum without needing to go to ETH first. And you can see how fast it is. The timestamps say this took 32 min. Between EVMs like Polygon to BSC it’s much faster and also FREE. You see I sent $200 and got $200.
So you see, based on Wanchain’s own standards for maintaining its contracts and relayers, there is no one in the industry I am more confident about bridging with than Wanchain. It’s great and you should try it today.
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Disclaimer
The information discussed by Altcoin Buzz is not financial advice. This is for educational, entertainment, and informational purposes only. Any information or strategies are thoughts and opinions relevant to the accepted levels of risk tolerance of the writer/reviewers and their risk tolerance may be different than yours. We are not responsible for any losses that you may incur as a result of any investments directly or indirectly related to the information provided. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are high-risk investments so please do your due diligence. This article has been sponsored by Wanchain. Copyright Altcoin Buzz Pte Ltd.
