Wormhole

What happened

Wormhole, a bridge issuing wrapped assets across several chains, lost roughly 120,000 wrapped ether in February 2022 when an attacker exploited a flaw in how its Solana-side contract verified the guardian signatures that authorise a mint. The attacker was able to produce a mint that the contract accepted without a matching deposit on Ethereum, leaving the wrapped tokens undercollateralised. Jump Crypto, which backed the project, replaced the missing ether so that holders of the wrapped asset were made whole.

What to take from it

A wrapped token is a claim that something is held elsewhere. When the check that enforces that link is broken, the token keeps circulating and looking normal while the collateral behind it no longer exists — and whether users are made whole comes down to whether somebody with a balance sheet chooses to step in.

Dates and figures are widely reported public estimates from coverage at the time, not KripZen's own audited data.