Some $100 million in cryptocurrency assets have been stolen from a Sunnyvale startup's service, it reported Thursday.
The assets were taken from the so-called bridge Harmony operates, the company said on Twitter. The startup, legally known as Simple Rules Co, has ceased all transactions on the bridge, dubbed Horizon, and notified other exchanges of the theft, it said in a Twitter thread.
"We have begun working with national authorities and forensic specialists to identify the culprit and retrieve the stolen funds," Harmony said in a tweet.
Harmony representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
With a bridge, owners of a particular kind of cryptocurrency can get access to another kind of cryptocurrency without formally trading one for the other. Instead, the bridge holds onto the original currency as a kind of collateral while giving the original owner tokens of the other currency. The arrangement can help owners save on hefty exchange fees.
The Horizon bridge mainly serves to allow holders of ether or the Binance coin to gain access to the Harmony currency.
Harmony was founded in 2018 by Stephen Tse, according to PitchBook Data. Tse was previously the founder of Spotsetter, legally known as Simple Rules Inc., which was acquired by Apple Inc. in 2014. Prior to that, he was a senior engineer at Google LLC for roughly four years, according to his LinkedIn profile
The startup raised $18 million in seed funding in 2018, as well as an undisclosed amount of funding in February, according to PitchBook.
The theft follows a massive sell-off in cryptocurrencies. Harmony's token, for example, is now trading for about 2.5 cents each, down its all-time high of about 38 cents a piece set in January. Bitcoin, the most widely held digital currency, is down nearly 70% from its record high, set in November.
