Incident All ledgers

Verus-Ethereum Bridge: $11.5m

Verus-Ethereum Bridge lost $11.5m on 17 May 2026. Ranked 180th of 1,272 crypto failures, with method, returned funds and comparable incidents.

Date: 17 May 2026
Lost: $11.5m
Returned or repaid: None recorded
Target: DeFi Protocol
Category: Bridge & Cross-Chain
Method: Forged Proof
Chains: Verus

In May 2026 an attacker exploited the Verus-Ethereum bridge with a forged cross-chain payload that passed cryptographic checks but had no cross-chain amount reconciliation, turning about $10 in VRSC fees into roughly $11.5 million in Ethereum assets.

Against the ledger

It ranks 180th of the 1,272 incidents with a known loss, and 24th in 2026.
It accounts for 13.8% of the $83.1m in known losses in May 2026.
56 incidents in the ledger are classified as Bridge & Cross-Chain, for $1.53bn in total. This one is 0.7% of that.
The ledger records no returned funds.

Other incidents named Verus-Ethereum

Date	Target	Lost	Type	Method	Returned
22 Jul 2026	Verus-Ethereum Bridge	$7.5m	DeFi Protocol	Forged Proof	—

Closest in size by the same method

Date	Target	Lost	Type	Method	Returned
04 Oct 2021	pNetwork	$13.0m	DeFi Protocol	Spoofed Event Log	—
15 May 2026	THORChain DEX	$10.7m	Chain	Bridge Logic Flaw	—
07 Jun 2026	Syscoin Bridge	$10.0m	DeFi Protocol	Forged Proof	—
01 Jan 2025	NoOnes	$7.9m	DeFi Protocol	Cross-Chain Message Spoofing	—
22 Jul 2026	Verus-Ethereum Bridge	$7.5m	DeFi Protocol	Forged Proof	—

All failures in 2026 · The failures ledger

Amounts are DefiLlama’s estimates and can change as incidents are revalued. Its returned figure can include money a company repaid itself, not only funds recovered from attackers. Source: DefiLlama.

Cite this Bitminer.io, “Verus-Ethereum Bridge, failures ledger”, data to 2 November 2026, https://bitminer.io/ledger/incident/verus-ethereum-bridge-2026-05-17/. How this is built