One of the wallets involved in the Nomad bridge exploit has moved a significant amount of assets today and not to the official Nomad recovery wallet.
The exploiter transferred around $7.5 million worth of cryptocurrency to an unknown wallet address amid an ongoing Nomad’s bounty program, encouraging the hackers to return the funds.
This is the latest update in the Nomad hack saga.
On Aug. 1 – only a few days after Nomad had announced closing the $22 million seed round with investors including Coinbase Ventures, Polygon, OpenSea, and others – the Nomad token bridge was hacked and led to $200 million worth of cryptocurrency being stolen.
Although not the biggest hack in terms of funds stolen, this attack received a lot of attention due to the unprecedented number of hackers involved – “300 unique addresses participated in the exploit,” the company said in the official statement, with some hackers even impersonating the company’s employees.
The reason behind the hack is believed to be an update in the protocol’s smart contracts, according to a research analyst at Paradigm, samczsun.
A few days after the exploit, the platform set up a 10% bounty program to incentivize the hackers to return the stolen funds. The program description explains that anyone who returns 90% of the funds they hacked, keeping the remaining 10%, will be considered “a white hat” and won’t be subject to legal prosecution.
On Aug. 17, Nomad updated its users on the progress that had been made on the way to funds recovery, including engaging with “white hats” through the bounty program and looking into ways to restart the Nomad bridge.
The company also said it is working with TRM Labs, the intelligence platform aimed at mitigating crypto fraud and financial crime, to “trace black hats” and recover funds.
According to Etherscan, white hackers have returned over $36.46 million worth of cryptocurrency at press time.
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