THORChain confirmed on May 15 that one of its six Asgard vaults was compromised for roughly $10.7 million via a GG20 threshold-signature key-leak; on May 18, Blockaid flagged an $11.58 million drain on the Verus-Ethereum bridge caused by the same class of source-destination value-binding gap that broke Wormhole and Nomad in 2022.
THORChain confirmed on May 15 that one of its six Asgard vaults had been compromised for approximately $10.7 million across Bitcoin, Ethereum, BNB Chain and Base, halting all trading and signing operations within the hour. Three days later, Blockaid flagged an active exploit on the Verus-Ethereum bridge that drained $11.58 million in tBTC, ETH and USDC before the attacker swapped most of it into 5,402.4 ETH and routed the proceeds toward Tornado Cash.
The two incidents are unrelated in mechanism but related in category. Both fit the pattern Peckshield highlighted in its mid-May report, which tallied eight bridge-related exploits collectively responsible for $328.6 million in losses across cross-chain protocols so far this year. Bridges are not getting safer. They are getting more sophisticated, and the failure modes have shifted from smart-contract bugs — the original Wormhole and Ronin breaches — toward validation gaps in the layers around the contracts.
The THORChain exploit was the more technically interesting of the two. The leading theory, confirmed by THORChain contributors in a Discord update later on Friday, is a vulnerability in the GG20 Threshold Signature Scheme implementation that allowed sensitive key material from vault participants to leak over multiple keygen or signing rounds. By accumulating enough leaked fragments, the attacker reconstructed the vault's TSS private key and was able to sign outbound transactions without the normal quorum check. A single newly churned node, identified as thor16ucjv3v695mq283me7esh0wdhajjalengcn84q, is believed to have facilitated the leak; the wallet addresses used to acquire and bond the RUNE for that node link back to the addresses that later received the stolen funds. THORChain has said no user swaps were affected — the entire loss is protocol-owned liquidity, which the community will now decide whether to absorb through slashing or recovery proposals.
The Verus breach was simpler and, in some ways, worse. Blockaid's post-mortem identified the root cause as a source-destination economic-value binding gap — the same class of defect that broke Wormhole in 2022 and Nomad later the same year. The Verus-Ethereum bridge correctly verified a notarised Verus state root, a Merkle proof of the cross-chain export, and the keccak256 hash binding between the serialised transfers and the export commitment. What it did not verify was that the source-chain export's totalamounts, totalburned and totalfees actually backed the payouts requested on the Ethereum side. The attacker built a 0.02 VRSC transaction whose output committed to a payout blob with empty source-side totals, the Verus protocol legally accepted it, the notaries dutifully signed the resulting state root, and the Ethereum bridge contract paid out 1,625 ETH plus 103 tBTC plus 147,000 USDC against essentially nothing. Cost to the attacker was about $10 in VRSC fees. Profit was $11.58 million.
Blockaid characterises the fix as around ten lines of Solidity in the bridge's checkCCEValues function. That estimate is probably accurate as a code change. It is also probably misleading as a description of the broader problem. Bridges fail in this category — value-binding gaps — because the engineers who build them are reasoning about cryptographic validity instead of economic validity, and the disciplines that catch one rarely catch the other. The Wormhole and Nomad incidents were exhaustively post-mortemed in 2022 and 2023. The Verus team has had four years of public material on how this attack works. It still happened.
The market response has been blunt. RUNE fell roughly 12% on the day of the THORChain announcement and has not recovered; VRSC saw an immediate and larger drop. Total value locked across cross-chain bridges has fallen 17% since the start of May. Chainalysis and TRM Labs both flagged earlier this year that DPRK-linked operators are now responsible for the majority of crypto theft by value, though neither group has been formally attributed to the THORChain or Verus incidents, and the technical signature of GG20 key leakage is uncharacteristic of recent DPRK toolchains.
The Verus team is patching. THORChain is debating recovery. The next bridge is the next failure.
