Hyperbridge Confirms Bridged Polkadot Exploit Was 10x Worse Than First Reported

Hyperbridge has revised losses from its April 13 exploit to roughly $2.5 million. That is about 10 times the original estimate of $237,000.

The team disclosed the new figure in a post-incident update on April 16. The revision adds losses from associated incentive pools. It also reflects forensic work across four EVM chains.

What the Revised Figure Includes

According to initial reports, an attacker minted 1 billion bridged DOT tokens and liquidated the entire amount in a single transaction, generating 108.2 ETH (roughly $237,000).

However, the team noted that the figure did not reflect the complete situation.

“Following reconciliation of attacker activity across each of the four chains, the two-phase nature of the attack, and losses from the associated incentive pools, the revised total realized loss is approximately $2.5 million, denominated in ETH and DOT at the time of the exploit,” the blog read.

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The analysis also clarified the sequence of events leading to the breach. What looked like a single exploit was in fact two linked events about an hour apart.

The attacker initially extracted approximately 245 ETH from the Token Gateway contract. Roughly an hour later, they carried out unauthorized minting of nearly 1 billion bridged DOT tokens.

These were subsequently offloaded into available liquidity across decentralized exchanges.

“On April 13, 2026, an attacker exploited a vulnerability in the Merkle Mountain Range (MMR) proof verification logic, allowing the culprit to mint assets and drain escrowed assets on Token Gateway. This affected DOT token pools on connected EVM networks: Ethereum, Base, BNB Chain, and Arbitrum,” the team explained.

The team emphasized that the exploit remains contained within the Token Gateway and the impacted bridged token contracts on the EVM networks.

Hyperbridge Recovery Path and Compensation

The blog revealed that a significant portion of stolen funds has been traced to Binance. Hyperbridge said it is working with the exchange’s compliance team and law enforcement on asset freezes. The team cautioned that meaningful recovery could take months to a year.

If recovery falls short, affected users will be made whole in BRIDGE tokens, the native asset of the Hyperbridge network. The compensation mechanism and disbursement schedule will be shared on April 13, 2027, exactly one year after the exploit.

“Pursuing recovery first, before any token-based compensation, is in service of affected users. Issuing token compensation prematurely, before on-chain tracing, exchange compliance processes, and law enforcement coordination have been given the time they need to produce results, would dilute the very asset we are committing to affected users and reduce the real value they ultimately receive,” Hyperbridge mentioned.

The team added that the Token Gateway remains paused and will not resume operations until the vulnerability is fully patched, the fix has undergone an independent audit with the report made public, and additional safeguards are implemented and operational. The coming months will test whether Hyperbridge can recover a meaningful share of the stolen funds.