Bloomberg News reports that the Solana ecosystem was hacked early Wednesday, which caused thousands of wallets to get affected in the recent hit. It adversely impacted the cryptocurrency market following the bridge protocol Nomad suffered at the beginning of the week.
As far as the extent of the damage is concerned, it is yet to be assessed. Over $5.2 million in crypto assets have been stolen to date, which is far more than 7,900 Solana wallets, as per Elliptic, a blockchain forensics company. Another security company, PeckShield, revealed that about four Solana wallet addresses siphoned off approximately $8 million from the victims.
According to Tom Robinson, the co-founder of Elliptic, the root cause is yet to be determined. It appears that it could have happened due to an error in the software related to the certain wallet instead of a flaw in the Solana blockchain itself.
The attack caused the SOL of the Solana token to plunge by as much as 7.3% on Wednesday in early trading to $38.40, which is the lowest in a week. Bitcoin was found to go up by 1.5% to $23,367.
Bloomberg News reports that crypto projects are a rich source of avenues for hackers, and as such late several hacking instances have been reported in this industry in the present year. Solana’s agonizing experience comes days after a bridge protocol for transferring crypto-tokens known as Nomad across the various blockchain ecosystems lost closer to about $200 million on Monday in a security exploit. From bridges in 2022 to date, $1 billion has been stolen already, as per a report developed by Elliptic.
According to Solana spokesman Austin Federa, much continues to be unknown at this juncture, except that there has been no impact on the hardware wallet.
There is a lot of speculation about the attack being that of the supply chain, but the nature of the exploit is still unclear, as revealed by Federa. Supply chain hacks usually occur when a provider or an outside party has access to the victim’s system and there is data infiltration.
Bloomberg News also reports that Solana, the victim of many network outages in the past, is a competitor of the Ethereum blockchain. As prices of the transaction on the Ethereum platform escalated in the last year, many individuals turned to Solana as another option as they have lower transaction fees and served as an alternative for the non-fungible tokens minting. The Solana code is comparatively popular with the clients, with the help of which individuals can build their decentralized finance applications.
Some of the non-fungible tokens were also stolen in the hack, but Robinson from Elliptic’s says that the full impact has still not been ascertained.
