Alex Labs, a Bitcoin layer-2 developer, has successfully frozen more than $3.9 million worth of crypto that was exploited from its BNB Smart Chain bridge. According to the team’s May 16 social media post, the attacker sent the funds to several different centralized exchanges (CEXs), which allowed them to be frozen with the cooperation of the exchanges.
The team recovered the complete balances for 17 different tokens, including a variety of cryptocurrencies such as aBTC, sUSDT, xBTC, and STX. The attacker also exploited $13.7 million worth of Stacks (STX) tokens, but made the mistake of sending “about 3 million” to centralized exchanges.
The attacker withdrew the funds by taking control of a private key that provided access to one of the bridge’s “vaults.” However, the team claimed that “The smart contract code and infrastructure underlying ALEX were not compromised.”
Alex Labs has offered a 10% bounty to the attacker and a promise not to prosecute if they return the other 90% of the stolen funds. The team is also preparing a police report, which will be filed if the attacker does not agree to negotiate.
The team is evaluating the deployment of $ALEX reserves held by ALEX Lab Foundation to compensate users who lost funds in the attack. They may also propose a Stacks network upgrade that will freeze the remaining funds and mint new tokens to be sent to victims.
The attack is not the only recent incident of a Bitcoin layer-2 bridge being targeted. On May 17, the XLink bridge was also attacked, and $10 million was lost. In that case, a white-hat hacker managed to recover $4.3 million of the stolen funds.
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Source: Cointelegraph
