(Boursier.com) — While cryptocurrency prices are going through one of the strongest storms in their short history, a new burglary has shaken the world of “cryptos” this week. More than 100 million dollars in cryptocurrencies were thus stolen during the hacking of the blockchain harmony.
The promoters of the Harmony project revealed on Friday that they were victims of an attack on Wednesday in which hackers stole cryptocurrencies in exploiting the weaknesses of Horizon, a technical bridge created by Harmony to allow circulation of assets between blockchain Ethereum and the Binance SmartChain.
To allow the circulation of cryptoassets between different blockchains, computer scientists have created these technical bridges (“bridges”), necessary for interoperability between the main blockchains, but hackers have concentrated their attacks on these bridges. Last March, it was also through a bridge that more than 620 million dollars were stolen by North Korean hackers on the network Ronin. It was one of the biggest crypto thefts ever.
More than a billion dollars of “cryptos” stolen in 2022
According to blockchain data analytics firm Elliptic, the criminals stole different cryptocurrencies from Harmony that had accumulated on the Horizon bridge, including ether, tether and USD Coin, which they then exchanged for gold. ether using decentralized exchanges. Elliptic estimates that more than $1 billion has already been stolen from bridges in 2022.
Created in 2017, Harmony is a blockchain that hosts projects for decentralized finance, which allows “peer-to-peer” applications to offer loans and other financial services at a lower cost, without traditional intermediaries such as banks.
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