White hat hackers have given Nomad Bridge tokens valued $32.6M.

In less than three hours, the cross-chain bridge had been stripped of all its resources.

Whitehat hackers have since returned over $32.6 million worth of cash, just hours after the Nomad token bridge revealed an Ethereum wallet address last week for the repatriation of funds following a $190 million attack. The stablecoins USD Coin (USDC), Tether (USDT), and Frax, as well as other cryptocurrencies, made up the great majority of the funds.

Nomad's latest audit by Quantstamp on June 6 showed the vulnerability of the protocol, which was rated as "Low Risk," according to research written by Paul Hoffman of BestBrokers. The public joined the attack as soon as the exploit was found by copy-pasting the original hack transaction, which was comparable to a "decentralised heist." In less than three hours, Nomad was depleted of bitcoins worth more than $190 million.

The initiative had raised $22.4 million in a seed round in April, which was only four months prior to the attack. Hoffman claimed that the assault made use of a Merkle root that had been incorrectly configured. Merkle roots are employed in cryptocurrencies to guarantee that data blocks transported across a peer-to-peer network are complete and unaltered. Any transaction message was essentially automatically validated because of a programming fault.

But not everyone who took part in the heist was profiting from the chance. Whitehat hackers withdrew money for the purpose of returning it safely almost shortly after the hack started. They did this by copying the original hacker's transaction hash. In contrast, one hacker allegedly utilised their Ethereum domain name to launder the stolen money, opening the door for cross-verification with information from other users of the domain who use Know-Your-Customer.