Nomad Bridge, a cross-chain communications protocol, had $190 million worth of assets stolen from it last week in what many referred to as “the first decentralized robbery.”
As of today, more than $36 million has been sent back to the official fund recovery address given by Nomad Bridge.
Transactions on Etherscan show that the recovery wallet currently has cryptocurrency holding valued at $36.4 million.
The wallet, identified by Etherscan as the “official Nomad funds recovery address,” has received ETH 2,179.5 (equal to about $3.9 million), USDC 9.77 million, USDT 5 million, WBTC 196 ($4.7 million), DAI 3.7 million, as well as various sums of other ERC-20 tokens.
The Nomad team revealed the fund recovery wallet on August 3. The company, however, said that people who returned at least 90% of the stolen assets would be deemed white hat hackers, and Nomad wouldn’t take legal actions against them. Thus, the return of stolen funds allegedly gained traction with the announcement of a bounty of up to 10%.
The team stated more than $20 million had already been received back at that time a statement.
In an effort to locate additional “white hat hackers” and reclaim more money, the team declared on Monday that they had “established the Nomad Official Communication Key to send on-chain messages to outstanding wallet addresses.”
2/ If you’re a white hat that wants to chat on-chain, please send a message to 0xc2cad8f49cf18475b6893acb209ee4884e7fc2a8.
If you’re a part of the community, share this to folks that might want to chat. We’re making it easy to open a line of communication with the Nomad team.
— Nomad (⤭⛓🏛) (@nomadxyz_) August 8, 2022
As previously mentioned, a “chaotic” attack targeted the Nomad Bridge earlier this month. Before the exploit, the bridge had $190 million in total value locked; however, the money was quickly lost.
The Nomad team described the attack as a “decentralized robbery” since everyone could join it by copying and pasting the original hack transaction due to a fault that “allowed the Replica contract to fail to authenticate messages appropriately.”
“Contracts that relied on the Replica for inbound message authentication as a result had security issues. The Nomad Bridge Router contract received false messages due to this authentication failure.
According to DeFi Llama, the project has a total value of $95,366.