What happened
On May 30, 2026, Gravity Bridge, which connects Ethereum and the Cosmos ecosystem, was drained of about $5.4 million in USDC, ETH, USDT, and PAXG after its bridge signing authority was compromised.
The failure was in signing-key custody and validator authorization rather than a defect in the bridge contract: compromised signing infrastructure produced apparently valid authorization for a malicious validator-set change and subsequent withdrawals.
How it happened
Public on-chain reconstruction says an attacker induced the validator set to sign a change shrinking it from 58 to 34, concentrating control; the reduced set then authorized withdrawals from the Ethereum-side bridge.
Protocol details
Market Context at Time of Hack
Funds Recovery
Recovered
$1
Net Loss
$5.4M
Evidence
- report @PeckShieldAlert incident report x.com
- report @coinminutes_en incident report x.com
- report Post-mortem rekt.news
- analysis DeFiLlama defillama.com
- analysis The Block: Gravity Bridge drained in suspected key compromise theblock.co
- analysis BlackHart: Gravity Bridge validator-set takeover blackhart.io
- analysis Olympix: Gravity Bridge exploit analysis olympix.security
Understand the attack patterns
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