Bridges serve as a net for making off-chain transactions, connecting different blockchains and allowing you to transfer funds between them. It will use wrapping to make it work, meaning it will make your tokens work on the chain you are transferring them to - it'll "wrap" it.
The last occurrence was at Nomad who hosts bridges for numerous currencies. The value that has been stolen is 190 million dollars. Quite a number for something being stolen huh? Even though the number is yet to be confirmed it looks like Pechshields estimates might as well be well correct.
As expected Nomad have been trying to resolve this issue tirelessly, reaching out to law enforcement and other services to recover the losses and find the hackers.
They hired TRM labs to help catch the hackers and make sure that the money goes back into the people's pockets as soon as possible. That brings a lot of hope since TRM has a history of successful fund recoveries in the past.
They also said on their twitter that they are aware and would like to warn you about all the fake Nomad accs giving fake addresses to get the funds themselves. Stay safe.
The funds left Nomads accounts in packs, stables, Eth, BTC etc have been sucked out of their systems. Experts say that this accident might be almost unprecedented at how much of a mess it was, everything was stolen all at once, or almost all at once. The chances of noticing the hack from happening were very slim as it's almost as if multiple hacks were happening all at once.
What's interesting is that only a couple of days prior to the incident Nomad published the list of their biggest investors, including the big sharks from Coinbase Ventures, OS and Crypto.com.
The gaining popularity of bridge hacks can do nothing good to the reputation of the crypto industry. Especially when the biggest heists happened in the last year alone! Let's hope this year is going to be better. On the bright side Eths Merge may solve some serious price and power usage issues for the crypto.
