Shibarium plans to relaunch Plasma Bridge and PoS Bridge with an additional layer of control, designing a refund mechanism for users affected by the hack.
Shibarium Prepares to Reboot Bridge, Plans to Refund Users After Hack
As Coin68 reported, on September 12, the Shiba Inu ecosystem suffered a major shock when the Shibarium bridge - a bridge between the Shibarium layer-2 network and Ethereum - became the target of a sophisticated attack, causing about 2.4 million USD to be stolen.
According to the investigation, the hacker used a flash loan to borrow 4.6 million BONE – Shibarium’s Governance Token . From there, they seem to have taken control of up to 10/12 validator signing keys, equivalent to 2/3 of the voting rights on the entire network. With this advantage, the hacker successfully siphoned 224.57 ETH and 92.6 billion SHIB from the bridge contract, then quickly transferred all the assets to a personal wallet.
Immediate response of the team
- Immediately after discovering the incident on September 12, the Shibarium development team activated a 24/7 emergency status. For more than 10 consecutive days, they coordinated with the security audit unit Hexens to handle, prevent the risk from spreading and restore the integrity of the system.
- Project team's handling measures :
Asset & Contract Isolation: Over 100 important contracts and assets in the Shibarium ecosystem have been quickly migrated to hardware wallets and Multisignature to ensure safety, avoiding the risk of further exploitation by hackers.
Validator key change: All validator signer keys are completely replaced, to eliminate the possibility of hackers continuing to abuse voting rights to gain control of the network.
Disable 4.6 million BONE: The team has upgraded the contract and changed the status to disable these Token . At the same time, the BONE withdrawal time has been extended from 1 checkpoint (~45 minutes) to 30 checkpoints (~24 hours), giving the project enough time to detect and handle any abnormalities.
- Previously, the dev team had offered a reward of 50 ETH if the hacker returned the assets. However, when the attacker did not respond and started moving the assets, the team decided not to deploy the bounty contract and focused their efforts on restoring the system.
Refund & restart bridge
- At the time of writing, Shibarium is now preparing to reboot Plasma Bridge and PoS Bridge with an additional layer of control to prevent the risk from recurring:
Plasma Bridge: Before reopening, Shibarium will integrate a blacklist mechanism at the smart contract level, allowing the system to automatically block addresses with malicious behavior.
PoS Bridge: will be restarted but not fully opened immediately. The team will deploy by gradually opening with scale limits, to be easy to control and react in time if anomalies are detected.
- In addition, the Shibarium team said that it will compensate users for damages, with a transparent mechanism that allows each person to verify the refund figures themselves. All relevant data – from the amount of assets affected to the source of funds used for compensation – will be made public.
- Capital for this plan has not been detailed yet, but will likely be a combination of reserve funds, ecosystem fees, and some on-chain compensation mechanisms.
- The plan is in the construction and completion stage and will be officially announced after the bridge is back in stable operation.
BONE Token Drops Sharply After Crash
- Although it has been almost a month since the hack, the price of BONE has not shown any signs of recovery. After suddenly increasing sharply from 0.165 USD to 0.31 USD in just one hour, this Token quickly plummeted to 0.13 USD, corresponding to a decrease of about 15% in the past month.
- SHIB price has not fluctuated too much, slightly down 1.6% in the last 24 hours and is currently fluctuating around 0.0000124 USD.
BONE price movement in the last 24 hours, screenshot on CoinGecko at 01:00 PM on 06/10/2025
SHIB price movement in the last 24 hours, screenshot on CoinGecko at 01:00 PM on 06/10/2025
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