ONE Drops as Harmony’s Bridge Hacked for Almost USD 100M

ONE, a native token of a cross-chain bridge provider, Harmony, is now one of the worst performers among the top 200 coins today, as the team confirmed they lost almost USD 100m in crypto in a theft.

At 08:54 UTC, ONE, ranked 125th by market capitalization on CoinGecko, trades at USD 0.024 and is down almost 9% in a day and over 3% in a week.

At around 11:13 PM UTC, Harmony said it “has identified a theft occurring this morning on the Horizon bridge amounting to approx. USD 100m.” The team claims that it does not impact their bitcoin (BTC) bridge and “its funds and assets stored on decentralized vaults are safe at this time.”

According to the announcement, Harmony has also notified exchanges and stopped the Horizon bridge to prevent further transactions.

“We have begun working with national authorities and forensic specialists to identify the culprit and retrieve the stolen funds,” they added.

“Assets were stolen on both Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain,” according to blockchain analytics firm Elliptic.

“A variety of assets were taken, including ETH, BNB, USDT, USDC and DAI. The stolen tokens have now been swapped for ETH using decentralized exchanges – a commonly-seen technique with these hacks,” they added.

Also, per the analysts, Harmony has seemingly sent the thief a message, embedded within an ETH transaction, asking them to negotiate.

Harmony claims that its bridges can connect any proof-of-work and proof-of-stake chains.
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(Updated at 04:23 UTC to clarify that the hacker stole ETH. Updated at 08:54 UTC with comments from Elliptic, the latest market data.)