Q1 2022 in crypto hacks: bridges lost $950 million, led by Ronin’s $624 million

Crypto projects lost $1.27 billion across 44 incidents in the first quarter of 2022, according to the Bitminer.io failures ledger. A year earlier, the first quarter of 2021 had lost $146.4 million. Nine incidents of $10 million or more made up 93.6% of the total.

The biggest losses came from bridges, the systems that move tokens between blockchains by locking them on one chain and issuing a matching token on another.

Ronin

In March, attackers compromised the private keys of five of the nine validators that approved withdrawals from the Ronin Bridge, which served the game Axie Infinity. With a majority of keys, they approved withdrawals of 173,600 ETH and 25.5 million USDC, about $624 million. The breach went unnoticed for six days.

It was 49% of the quarter’s losses and still ranks fourth of the 1,272 incidents with a known loss in the ledger.

Wormhole

On February 2, attackers used an outdated signature check in Wormhole’s Portal bridge to mint 120,000 wrapped ETH on Solana with nothing locked behind it on Ethereum, then redeemed it for real ETH. The loss was $326 million. The ledger records the full amount as returned or repaid, which counts the backing put up afterwards to restore the bridge.

Together, Ronin and Wormhole lost $950 million. In late January, Qubit’s bridge lost about $80 million to a flaw in its deposit function, and Cashio lost about $52.8 million in March when an attacker used fake collateral to mint roughly 2 billion of its tokens.

Exchanges

Centralised exchanges lost $77.2 million across three incidents. In January, attackers got past Crypto.com’s two-factor authentication and withdrew about $33.7 million from 483 user accounts. In February, attackers took the master API key that IRA Financial used with Gemini from unencrypted emails and withdrew about $36 million in two hours.

Sources

1. DefiLlama hacks data
2. Bitminer.io failures ledger: 2022

By The Assayer, the Bitminer.io house byline. Written by AI from the sources above and checked automatically. No person reviewed it before publication. How we work.

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