Horizon Bridge, Built On Harmony, Witnesses Hack
Horizon Bridge was recently notified of a malicious attack on the network with multiple transactions where eleven transactions managed to extract tokens worth $100 million. The Harmony Protocol team was notified about the attack on June 23, 2022, saying that the bridge was compromised at around 5:30 AM PST.
The team reacted quickly by informing the FBI, exchange partners, and cyber security partners about the hack. Harmony Protocol has sought their assistance in identifying the culprit and retrieving the stolen assets.
All the concerned parties are investigating the matter regarding the hack attack on Horizon Bridge. More details will be shared after the investigation concludes.
Harmony Protocol has underlined the importance of focusing on decentralized bridges as everyone takes a step towards making Web3 a vast reality. A lot of work is yet to be done to ensure that the future is safe from such attacks.
Harmony facilitates 2-second transaction finality with 100 times lower fees by running its mainnet on Ethereum. It is an open and fast blockchain that offers transfers across five chains, including Binance and Ethereum.
The platform accepts collectibles, assets, governance, and identity. The average cost of every transaction goes as low as $0.0001. The network has a total of $1.09 billion of value locked. It looks to lead the revolution of Web3 by promoting interoperability so that the users are never locked on a single platform for the rest of their lives.
Harmony’s bridges can connect every type of chain: Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake. The platform recognizes the three important pillars – scalability, security, and decentralization – to balance them with secure and random state sharding.
Harmony aims to achieve 1-second finality by the end of the fourth quarter of 2022. Other pointers that Harmony plans on achieving by the end of Q4-2022 are:-
- zkSync rollups
- Decentralized ops
- ONE annual conference
- Private authentication
By 2026, Harmony looks to bring the best results of Zero-Knowledge Proofs to production and decentralize governance through thousands of DAOs.
Harmony has created courses for zkDAO and zkU to educate the open community of developers by bringing only the best research to production.
Harmony shared the update through an official blog post after it was notified about the malicious attack. Tokens have been retrieved in various cases; however, much effort had to be invested.
The currency blockchain has its advantages and disadvantages, which are being studied through such cases. As Harmony has quoted, this incident is a humbling & unfortunate reminder of how work is paramount to the future.
Web3 is still a work in progress, and it will be at its peak only if these malicious attacks are dealt with with the right knowledge to recover the loss and stop them. The adoption of the new technology is on the rise, meaning that many people are getting on board.
The community, as of now, can only wait for the investigation to conclude so that more details can be studied.
