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Ethereum bridges lose $31.7M in hours after control failures
About $7.5 million of the Verus bridge payouts were valued as unbacked withdrawals, while B² suspended staking after unauthorized access to its staking contract upgrade authority.
CryptoSlate reports that two Ethereum bridges, AFX and Verus-Ethereum, suffered combined losses of about $31.69 million within hours of each other, and a separate Ethereum-related protocol, B² Network, suspended token staking after unauthorized access to a contract upgrade authority.
Blockaid said it detected the AFX exploit at around 21:30 UTC on July 22, and an Arbitrum transaction showed 24.15 million USDC leaving the bridge run by AFX, a decentralized trading protocol on Arbitrum. AFX said it suspended its USDC custody bridge and characterized the incident as isolated from its trading infrastructure, mainnet, and the Arbitrum network, and it said preliminary findings pointed to coordinated social engineering and infrastructure compromise that escalated from a development environment into internal build infrastructure and validator systems.
The Verus episode included an Ethereum transaction showing the bridge releasing 1,137.4528 ETH and seven token transfers, with Blockaid valuing the unbacked payouts at about $7.54 million. SlowMist said the bridge approved eight withdrawals without proving matching assets were backed them, linking the failure to a broader cross-chain import-validation class seen in a May exploit, though it said the attacks used different mechanics.
For B², the network said unauthorized access to its staking contract upgrade authority led it to suspend normal staking during security reviews, contain the issue, and promise full compensation to affected users. CryptoSlate reports that B² did not disclose a loss amount by July 24, excluding its incident from the $31.69 million total, and it offered a manual exit option for users to request unstaking through its official Discord with ownership-verified requests processed within one business day.
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