Meter, an infrastructure provider for DeFi, is urging a hacker who exploited a deposit mechanism to return the $4.4M of stolen funds.
A blockchain infrastructure company that operates in the decentralized finance space, Meter, was hacked on February 5, 2022. The hack happened on a bridge and saw $4.4 million stolen. Stolen funds included 1,391 ETH and 2.74 BTC, according to blockchain security firm Shield.
The hack took place at 6 am PST. The hacker exploited a vulnerability of the bridge to mint a large amount of BNB and WETH tokens, which depleted reserves of these on the bridge, Meter Passport. Meter became aware of the depletion and halted all bridge transactions. They then proceeded to investigate further. The hacker exploited a bug introduced onto the bridge by the Meter team. The team created a new bug when they added the ability to wrap and unwrap BNB and ETH automatically. The code assumed trust incorrectly, which permitted the hacker to call the ERC20 deposit function to mimic transfers of BNB and ETH. The Meter and Moonriver networks were affected.
Counter working on a repayment plan
Meter has discovered pieces of the hacker’s digital breadcrumb and is cooperating with law enforcement to identify the hacker. Meter is busy with a compensation plan for WETH and BNB. They urged all WETH and BNB liquidity providers to withdraw their liquidity from the pools until further updates are provided. Meter is working to take a snapshot of WETH and BNB prices before the hack. They will convert the token values to their native (Meter) MTRG token. The rest of the inflated BNB and WETH prices are based on the value stolen from the liquidity pools. They allocated $4.4 million worth of MTRG based on its price on February 6, 2022.
This is the second bridge exploit that has occurred in less than a week. On Feb. 3, 2022, the Wormhole network was affected, where 120,000 WETH was drained from the bridge. The Wormhole team offered the hacker a whitehat agreement. They would award the hacker $10M for the hack’s details and the return of the drained WETH.
Meter specializes in cross-chain functionality
Meter provides a high performance Ethereum virtual machine compatible side chain for public blockchains including Ethereum. The sidechain is compatible with Ethereum dApps. Each public channel that Meter connects to via a bridge has a native consensus mechanism, scaling, and incentives. Meter deals with proper monetary policy, cross-chain communication, and value settlement.
