Hackers Steal Cryptocurrency Worth $80 Million From Decentralized Finance Platform Qubit Finance

Qubit in a tweet stated that they were working with their security and network partners after hackers stole $80 million worth cryptocurrency.

High-profile heists have become a common occurrence in the cryptocurrency world and Qubit Finance is the most recent decentralised finance (DeFi) platform to be targeted by hackers. They were able to gain access to Qubit Finance, which is built on the Binance Smart Chain, and steal approximately $80 million (about ₹ 600 crores). Qubit's QBridge protocol was robbed of 2,06,809 Binance Coin (BNB) by the addresses associated with the heist. This is the largest cryptocurrency heist in 2022 so far.

Qubit Finance admitted the heist in a tweet that read: “The team is currently working with security and network partners on next steps. We will share further updates when available."

The Qubit team issued another statement to inform clients that the hacker and their impacted assets were being monitored. The blog post also states that they have contacted the hacker to provide the “maximum bounty offer” as calculated by their programme.

According to security firm PeckShield, who had auditted Qubit's contracts, the assets were valued over $80 million at current rates. The security firm also stated that the QBridge was hacked to mint a “huge amount of xETH collateral” that was then used to drain the entire amount of Binance Coin held on QBridge.

DeFi platforms such as Qubit Finance use smart contracts rather than third parties to provide customers with financial services such as trading, lending, and borrowing. Users can supply their cryptocurrency holdings to the Qubit protocol and borrow money against those for a predetermined amount. QBridge is a cross-chain functionality that allows users to collateralise their assets on other networks without having to move their assets between chains. According to an “incident analysis” by security firm CertiK the attacker used a deposit option in the QBridge contract to fraudulently generate 77,162 qXETH, which is an asset representing Ether bridged via Qubit. The procedure was tricked into assuming that attackers had made a deposit when they hadn't. CertiK also stated that the hacker repeated these acts several times, converting all of the assets to Binance Coin.

Qubit's QBT was down 34.6 per cent according to data from CoinGecko. Much of the fall happened after the heist came to light