It's been another rough weeks for Bay Area crypto companies as two firms, Solana and Nomad, suffered major hacks in the span of a few days.
Yesterday over $5 million equivalent was stolen in cryptocurrency from around wallets on the Solana were hacked from 7,900 wallets, according to Bloomberg, bringing speculation that the entire Solana network, a massive ecosystem of apps using the Solana blockchain that powers the world's 9th largest cryptocurrency, had been compromised.
However, Solana pointed to a third party wallet firm, Slope, and blamed vulnerabilities in its wallets for the hack.
Slope posted an open response online, telling its users to transfer its assets to a new wallet with a new seed phrase or passcode.
"We have some hypotheses as to the nature of the breach, but nothing is yet firm," the company wrote in a statement. "We feel the community's pain, and we were not immune. Many of our own staff and founders' wallets were drained."
Solana was founded in San Francisco and has since split off into the Solana Foundation, a nonprofit that acts as the custodian of the network in Zurich, and Solana Labs a company still in SF that builds products in the Solana ecosystem.
Earlier in the week Nomad, a company registered in San Francisco but with a distributed workforce, was the victim of a hack targeting the bridge it operated which connected differing blockchains. Hackers managed to steal around $190 million in cryptocurrency moving through the bridge in a kind of free for all, where more and more hackers joined in once the exploit became common knowledge.
Nomad responded by posting a statement on Twitter, pleading with hackers to return the money and saying they were working with a security firm that was capable of tracking the funds.
Surprisingly over $9 million has so far been returned, according to Coindesk.
We talked to Nomad's founder Pranay Mohan in April when the firm raised its Series A. He said he was attempting to build the plumbing of web3 in order to make it safe for mass adoption. "If we can’t build it without losing $600 million, how can we ever expect normal people to use it," he said.
Cross chain bridges striving to create foundational protocols that will unite disparate blockchain ecosystems have been the victims of some of the largest hacks in the crypto world this year. An estimated $2 billion has been stolen from cross-chain bridges so far this year, according to the crypto analytics firm Chainalysis, the biggest of which was a $600 million hack of the bridge servicing a popular crypto game Axie Infinity, which was allegedly carried out by a North Korean group.
