£155.5m stolen from crypto firm Nomad

Crypto firm Nomad had $190m (£155.5m) in crypto stolen from it in a heist today.

Hackers targeted Nomad’s “bridge” which allows crypto transfers between blockchains and stole £155.5m worth of users’ cryptocurrencies, crypto analytics firm PeckShield said, according to Reuters.

Nomad tweeted it was “aware of the incident involving the Nomad token bridge” and that it was currently investigating it.

“We are working around the clock to address the situation and have notified law enforcement and retained leading firms for blockchain intelligence and forensics,” the company said on Twitter. “Our goal is to identify the accounts involved and to trace and recover the funds.”

Nomad had said today that it was aware of “impersonators” posing as Nomad and collect funds through giving fraudulent addresses.

Nomad did not immediately respond to City PM’s request for comment.

Crypto thefts and risen recently and attacks on crypto bridges in particular have led to thefts of more than $1bn (£0.8bn) this year, according to blockchain analytics company Elliptic. 

In June, crypto company Harmony was the victim of a $100m (£82m) hack on its Horizon Bridge with a number of attacks on bridges occurring in 2022.

Bridges can be vulnerable to attacks as they are not decentralised, have large stores of liquidity, and can sometimes not have as much security, Elliptic said.