Wormhole raises $225M at $2.5B valuation

November 29, 2023 Coin Telegraph

The protocol reached a total value locked of $3.8 billion at its peak.

Cross-chain protocol Wormhole has secured a $225 million investment at a valuation of $2.5 billion.

According to the Nov. 29 announcement, the investment round was led by Brevan Howard, Coinbase Ventures, Multicoin Capital, Jump Trading, ParaFi, Dialectic, Borderless Capital, and Arrington Capital.

The Wormhole Foundation also announced the launch of Wormhole Labs, which the company says "is an independent technology company that specializes in building products, tools, and reference implementations that help grow cross-chain activity and development." Currently, its blockchain-to-blockchain communications technology is used to bridge assets, power oracle data feeds, and transfer non-fungible tokens.

Wormhole was launched in 2021 and has since facilitated over $35 billion in transactions. Developers claim that the protocol processes over 2 million cross-chain messages across more than 30 chains every day.

In February 2022, Wormhole was hacked for more than $321 million from an unauthorized minting glitch on its Ethereum-Solana bridge. Shortly after the incident, venture capital firm Jump Crypto pledged to replenish more than $320 million in funds lost during the hack.

In May investors of the former Terra Luna ecosystem filed a lawsuit against Jump Trading, the high-frequency trading firm which owns Jump Crypto, alleging the firm and its CEO, Kanav Kariya, manipulated the price of TerraUSD to gain roughly $1.3 billion in profits. The allegations have not yet been proven in court.

Blockchain developers launch $50M fund to increase Wormhole adoption

May 18, 2023 Coin Telegraph

Blockchain developers launch M fund to increase Wormhole adoption

Bridge

Wormhole is a cross-chain messaging protocol often used to transfer assets from one blockchain to another.

A $50 million fund has been launched to help startups that use the Wormhole cross-chain messaging protocol, according to a May 18 announcement. The new fund is being managed by venture capital fund Borderless Capital and is backed by over 20 other blockchain development teams and venture capital firms, including Circle, Polygon Ventures, Solana Foundation, JumpCrypto, and others.

It's time to make building in crypto more accessible than ever before.

Introducing the $50m Cross-Chain Ecosystem Fund, powered by Wormhole! pic.twitter.com/y3VeCsUrSa
— Wormhole (@wormholecrypto) May 18, 2023

The fund will help startups that are “innovating cutting-edge apps, infrastructure, or tools that span multiple ecosystems,” according to its application page on the Wormhole website, which also describes the fund as “anti-maxi” or promoting the idea that more than one blockchain is needed to solve users’ problems.

David Garcia, CEO & Managing Partner of Borderless Capital, stated that he thought the new fund would help to grow the Web3 economy and allow applications to attract new users:

“Our goal is to empower builders to transcend the limitations of individual ecosystems, paving the way for blockchain applications and protocols to realize their full potential."

Wormhole is a cross-chain messaging protocol. It allows different blockchain networks to communicate with each other and is often used to bridge assets from one network to another. For example, if a user wanted to transfer Ether (ETH) from the Ethereum network to the Solana network, they could do so using Wormhole. It is connected to over 20 different networks, the announcement said.

Other cross-chain messaging protocols include LayerZero, Celer, DeBridge, and many others.

Wormhole has expanded its network of partners in the past few months. In January, crypto exchange Uniswap chose it as the official bridging protocol for its cross-chain governance between Ethereum and BNB Network. And on April 26, Wormhole integrated with Circle’s Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol to allow for simpler transfers of US Dollar Coin from Ethereum to Avalanche.

However, Wormhole has also met with controversy over its security in the past. Its Solana bridge was hacked in February, 2022, leading to $321 million in losses. Developers later patched the faulty code that had led to the exploit and reimbursed all users.

Magazine: Should crypto projects ever negotiate with hackers? Probably

Jump Crypto & Oasis.app counter exploits Wormhole hacker for $225M

February 25, 2023 Coin Telegraph

<div>Jump Crypto & Oasis.app counter exploits Wormhole hacker for 5M</div>

Coin Telegraph

The counter exploit came after the High Court of England and Wales ordered Oasis.app to work with Jump Crypto to retrieve the stolen funds.

Web3 infrastructure firm Jump Crypto and decentralized finance (DeFi) platform Oasis.app have conducted a “counter exploit” on the Wormhole protocol hacker, with the duo managing to claw back $225 million worth of digital assets and transfer them to a safe wallet.

The Wormhole attack occurred in February 2022 and saw roughly $321 million worth of Wrapped ETH (wETH) siphoned via a vulnerability in the protocol’s token bridge.

The hacker has since shifted around the stolen funds through various Ethereum-based decentralized applications (dApps), and via Oasis, they recently opened up a Wrapped Staked ETH (wstETH) vault on Jan. 23, and a Rocket Pool ETH (rETH) vault on Feb. 11.

In a Feb. 24 blog post, the Oasis.app team confirmed that a counter exploit had taken place, outlining that it had “received an order from the High Court of England and Wales” to retrieve certain assets that related to the “address associated with the Wormhole Exploit.”

The team stated that the retrieval was initiated via “the Oasis Multisig and a court-authorized third party,” which was identified as being Jump Crypto in a preceding report from Blockworks Research.

Transaction history of both vaults indicates that 120,695 wsETH and 3,213 rETH were moved by Oasis on Feb. 21 and placed in wallets under Jump Crypto’s control. The hacker also had around $78 million worth of debt in MakerDao’s DAI stablecoin that was retrieved.

“We can also confirm the assets were immediately passed onto a wallet controlled by the authorized third party, as required by the court order. We retain no control or access to these assets,” the blog post reads.

*@spreekaway tweet on the counter exploit: Twitter*

Referencing the negative implications of Oasis being able to retrieve crypto assets from its user vaults, the team emphasized that it was “only possible due to a previously unknown vulnerability in the design of the admin multisig access.”

The post stated that such a vulnerability was highlighted by white hat hackers earlier this month.

“We stress that this access was there with the sole intention to protect user assets in the event of any potential attack, and would have allowed us to move quickly to patch any vulnerability disclosed to us. It should be noted that at no point, in the past or present, have user assets been at risk of being accessed by any unauthorized party.”

pic.twitter.com/NX1fclJs5V
— foobar (@0xfoobar) February 24, 2023

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Jump Crypto replenishes funds from $320M Wormhole hack in largest-ever DeFi ‘bailout’

February 3, 2022 Coin Telegraph

<div>Jump Crypto replenishes funds from 0M Wormhole hack in largest-ever DeFi 'bailout'</div>

Blockchain

The venture capital firm dug into its own pockets to restore trust in the Wormhole ecosystem.

On Thursday, Jump Crypto, a crypto venture capital firm that owns Certus One, the developer of the Wormhole token bridge, announced it had deposited 120 thousand Ether (ETH) into a Solana-Ethereum bridge that suffered a devastating exploit . The day prior, hackers fraudulently minted 120 thousand wrapped Ether (wETH) worth $321 million on the Solana (SOL) platform, then redeemed 93,750 wETH for ETH on the Ethereum network while swapping the rest for other altcoins on the Solana network.

The cross-chain ETH-wETH is supposed to have an exchange ratio of 1:1 against one another. Therefore, the unauthorized minting of wETH leads to significant inflation, which can quickly degrade confidence in the underlying bridge. After the latest "bailout" by Jump Crypto and a patch fix, however, things appear to be back to normal, with Wormhole developers tweeting:

"All funds have been restored, and Wormhole is back up. ETH contract has been filled, and all wETH are backed 1:1."

Many users quickly took to social media to thank Jump Crypto for the noble move, with @terrysoh87 writing:

"Thank you so much. I know VC often gets hated on, but its times like this, everyone hopes VC saves the day. WAGMI [We are all going to make it]"

But there also remains a glaring problem — the whereabouts of the "hacked funds" and whether or not the malicious actor who took them would face the consequences as to deter similar decentralized finance scams in the future. As these tokens were fraudulently minted and still exist in the ecosystem, it raises concerns about the fungibility of "hacked" ETH tokens as they are laundered into "clean" ETH. In addition, the minting of so many tokens could lead to temporary inflationary concerns. @dotstack (rhymer.stk) wrote:

like?
i just don’t get it. instead of focusing on recovering funds, we’re talking about what? a bailout?
i just hope it’s a loan pending funds recovery.
— rhymer.stk (@dotstack) February 3, 2022

Jump Crypto

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