Bridge Exploit attacks in 2026

An attacker abused Cysic's bridge to mint 10 million unbacked CYS on BNB Chain, dumping most of it for about $727,000 in ETH before the token could be blacklisted.

An attacker minted 19 million unbacked THEO on Base through Autheo's Hyperlane cross-chain route and swapped them for about 700 ETH, crashing the token roughly 92%.

An attacker abused a bug in NEAR Intents' Omni cross-chain deposit and withdrawal system to drain roughly $3.8 million in USDT from a BNB Chain hot wallet.

An attacker exploited Payy Network's Ethereum rollup contract with a malicious verifyRollup transaction, draining roughly $1.83 million in USDC and forcing the payments platform offline.

An attacker abused a block-validation flaw in Meter to mint unbacked wrapped MTRG through the Meter Passport bridge, dumping about $2.3 million of it on PancakeSwap and crashing both MTR and MTRG.

A compromised bridge signing key let an attacker drain FET and mint AGIX, NTX and WMTx across the ASI Alliance's Ethereum token-conversion contracts, amassing roughly $16.77 million in tokens.

An attacker abused Chainflip's Tron settlement path, appending a memo to an already-signed deposit to trigger duplicate payouts and drain 736,442 USDT.

An attacker exploited Symbiosis's BridgeV2 contract to mint about 46.1 billion unbacked synthetic Bitcoin tokens and cash out a slice for roughly $0.77 million.

An attacker abused a double-spend flaw in Nomic's Bitcoin bridge to mint about 39.84 unbacked nBTC, leaving roughly 36% of Osmosis's alloyed Bitcoin without reserves.

An attacker exploited a range-proof caching bug in Liquid's Elements software to mint about 4,000 unbacked L-BTC and peg them out for roughly $319 million in real bitcoin.

An attacker fed Allbridge's Base router a forged Circle CCTP message and padded it with an Aave flash loan to drain about $190,000 in USDC that a real deposit had just credited.

Just over two months after a May hack, the Verus-Ethereum bridge was drained again for ~$7.54M through the same unpatched import-verification path.

Cross-chain bridge Across Protocol was attacked on its Solana deployment; the team said user funds were safe with only Risk Labs operating funds potentially hit and no loss disclosed.

A leaked SGX signing key in Taiko's public GitHub let an attacker forge bridge proofs and drain about $1.7M from the L1 Bridge and ERC20Vault on Ethereum.

A flawed Secret Network bridge contract let an attacker forge IBC packets and mint unbacked saTokens, draining roughly $4.67M of Axelar-bridged assets.

A proof-validation flaw in Syscoin's cross-chain bridge let an attacker mint roughly 5 billion unauthorized SYS — over five times the supply — worth just under $10M.

An attacker submitted forged guardian VAAs to Alephium's Wormhole-fork TokenBridge, draining about $815,000 of custody assets from Ethereum and BNB Chain in roughly seven minutes.

Gravity Bridge, the Cosmos-Ethereum cross-chain bridge, was drained of roughly $5.4 million after attackers apparently compromised validator signing keys and forged unauthorized withdrawals.

Verus-Ethereum bridge paid out $11.58M after an attacker submitted a 0.02 VRSC export — no source/destination value-binding check on either side.

$292M unbacked rsETH minted after attackers exploited KelpDAO's 1-of-1 LayerZero DVN setup; the largest DeFi hack of 2026, with TVL falling $13B after.

1B bridged DOT minted on Hyperbridge after a missing bounds check in VerifyProof let an attacker forge MMR proofs; realised loss ~$2.5M.

$4.3M drained from IoTeX's ioTube bridge via a validator key compromise; attacker also minted 111M CIOTX and 9.3M CCS. IoTeX pledged full user compensation.