Cross-chain liquidity protocol Symbiosis has recovered around 15 bitcoin that had been put at risk by an attack from an unknown hacker on September 11, the project's team announced.
The attacker exploited a vulnerability in the BridgeV2 smart contract, allowing them to mint a large quantity of uncollateralized synthetic syBTC tokens with a nominal value running into billions of dollars, the Symbiosis team acknowledged. Developers said they managed to isolate about 15 BTC that had been held as collateral backing the bridge.
As a result, the actual damage turned out to be far lower than initially feared, Symbiosis representatives said. The hacker managed to exchange roughly 4.39 WBTC, worth about $336,000, through the Uniswap v4 platform before the funds were isolated. The team said the recovered 15 bitcoin are now held in a wallet under its control.
Compensation plan promised
In its announcement, Symbiosis said it was reaching out directly to all affected partners under its licensing agreements. The team said it was developing a compensation system and would publish the criteria for it soon.
Symbiosis also offered a reward equal to 20% of the recovered sum to anyone who provides information that helps retrieve the remaining assets.
Precedent from the Liquid Network
The incident follows a similar case in which hackers returned 3,400 bitcoin, worth about $270 million, to a wallet on the Liquid Network. Attackers had previously withdrawn roughly 4,000 bitcoin, worth about $320 million, from that same network. The return of those funds was reported by Samson Mow, chief executive of JAN3 and a former senior executive at Blockstream.
Symbiosis is a cross-chain liquidity protocol that lets users swap and bridge assets such as bitcoin between different blockchain networks using synthetic tokens like syBTC, which are meant to be backed by real collateral held in the protocol's bridges.
