Gravity Bridge, a decentralized blockchain facilitating cross-chain transfers between Ethereum and Cosmos, was reportedly drained of roughly $5.4 million, prompting validators to halt the bridge.
Onchain analyst Specter first flagged the weird outflows in a Saturday publish on X, revealing that the bridge contract key might have been compromised. “It seems the Gravity Bridge contract key might have been compromised, ensuing within the theft of $5.4M,” Specter wrote.
Safety agency PeckShield additionally confirmed the exploit in a publish, breaking down the stolen belongings as roughly $4.3 million in USDC (USDC), 274 Wrapped Ether (WETH) price roughly $553,000, $434,000 in USDt (USDT) and 14.164 PAX Gold (PAXG) tokens price about $64,000.
Supply: PeckShield
PeckShield reported {that a} portion of the haul had already been laundered by means of instant-swap service ChangeNow and thru Binance, whereas the theft pockets was nonetheless holding round 2,102 ETH price roughly $4.23 million on the time of its report.
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Gravity Bridge acknowledges assault
Gravity Bridge acknowledged the incident on X with out detailing what went improper. “There was an unlucky incident on Gravity,” the staff wrote, including that validators “ought to halt their validators and orchestrators whereas this incident is being investigated.” In a follow-up publish, the staff confirmed the bridge had been halted.
Gravity Bridge permits tokens to maneuver freely in each instructions, from Ethereum to Cosmos wallets and DEXs like Osmosis, and from Cosmos-based blockchains again to Ethereum platforms like Uniswap. In contrast to bridges that depend on centralized multi-signatures or non-public node teams, it makes use of its full validator set to authorize transfers, making it one of many extra decentralized bridge designs within the area, in accordance to its web site.
Gravity Bridge’s native token is Graviton (GRAV), utilized by validators to safe the bridge. The token is at the moment buying and selling at $0.0007053, down 4% over the previous day, in accordance to information from CoinMarketCap.
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Bridge exploits are spooking establishments
As Cointelegraph reported, JPMorgan analysts have flagged bridge safety as a serious problem in an April analysis observe, questioning whether or not DeFi can scale to fulfill institutional demand. The priority comes amid the latest Versus-Ethereum bridge assault, which was the eighth main bridge exploit of 2026, with cumulative losses throughout these incidents reaching $328.6 million.
Following the KelpDAO breach in April, which drained roughly $290 million and was attributed to North Korea’s Lazarus Group, whole worth locked throughout DeFi fell from almost $100 billion to round $86 billion in simply two days, with outflows hitting swimming pools that had no direct publicity to the compromised belongings.
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