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Hacker saves Arbitrum from $250 million attack

A so-called "white hat" hacker protects the Arbitrum blockchain from a massive attack with his discovery.

By Mike Hesp
• 2 min read
Hacker saves Arbitrum from $250 million attack

A so-called "white hat" hacker protected the Arbitrum blockchain against a massive attack with his find. He was rewarded with 400 ETH.

The Ethereum Layer 2 platform Arbitrum paid a developer 400 ETH (about US$520,000) as a reward for uncovering a critical bug in its code. This was reported by The Block.

That saved the network from a potential attack that would have caused more than $250 million in damage. The bug bounty hunter, known by the pseudonym "0xriptide", found a vulnerability in the cross-chain bridge between Ethereum and Arbitrum Nitro.

As a so-called "white hat" hacker, he then warned the Arbitrum team instead of exploiting the flaw for his own benefit. According to his own statements, the team behind Arbitrum paid him a reward for this.

0xriptide was initially grateful for this, but later complained on Twitter that a higher payout would have been more appropriate. The highest Arbitrum bounty is two million dollars, according to the bug bounty platformView post on X. Compared with the hundreds of millions of dollars in potential damage caused by the bug, this is significantly less.

Time and again individual developers or white-hat hackers stumble upon bugs in the code of major blockchains. Recently, an Ethereum developer saved the Avalanche blockchain from the brink of collapse.

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