Nomad Recovers Nearly $20M of Stolen $190M

Recovered funds in Nomad’s official wallet have increased over the past 24 hours

article-image

Blockworks exclusive art by axel Rangel

share

key takeaways

  • Nomad is considering a 10% bounty for hackers who return most of their stolen funds
  • The largest return to date has been 100 ETH ($160,000)

Token bridge Nomad suffered a hack on Monday that resulted in a loss of $190 million in cryptocurrencies. So far, $19.4 million of those funds have been sent back to the protocol.

Nomad created a recovery wallet address in a plea to the “white hat hackers and ethical researcher friends who have been safeguarding ETH/ERC-20 tokens” to return the lost digital assets.

The wallet was set up in association with custodian bank Anchorage Digital. Nomad has since taken to Twitter to thank some of its contributors.

Loading Tweet..

Nomad’s hack resulted from an issue in the code itself, 1KX Research told Blockworks. Nomad developers had accidentally enabled a code setting which automatically verified any transaction script sent to the protocol, as long as they had a default “root” of “0x00.”

The result was a free-for-all involving onlookers rushing to submit illicit transactions, quickly draining the token bridge of all user funds kept inside its associated smart contract.

Nomad has acknowledged that some users wanted “more consistent communications” and apologized for not having “provided that up to this point.”

The firm announced via Twitter that hackers who return at least 90% of the total funds they hacked may be considered for a bounty of up to 10%. 

This incident is the third-biggest cryptocurrency hack this year after the Solana-to-Ethereum Wormhole bridge and the Axie Infinity Ronin bridge exploits, which lost $325 million and $625 million, respectively, valued at the time of the exploits.


Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters:

Tags

Decoding crypto and the markets. Daily, with Byron Gilliam.

Upcoming Events

Old Billingsgate

Mon - Wed, October 13 - 15, 2025

Blockworks’ Digital Asset Summit (DAS) will feature conversations between the builders, allocators, and legislators who will shape the trajectory of the digital asset ecosystem in the US and abroad.

recent research

Unlocked by Template (10).png

Research

Innovations on Aptos’ technical design through Raptr, Shardines, and Zaptos approach near-optimal latency and throughput by unlocking 100% utilization of network resources, with the capacity to settle 260k transactions per second with latencies less than 800ms. The original Move language was revamped with the launch of Move 2, supporting more expressivity in smart contract logic and a scalable ability to interact with high volume datasets. The ecosystem has benefitted from strong asset inflows, now hosting over $1.3B in stablecoins, $450M in bridged BTC, and $530M in RWAs. Activity in the Aptos ecosystem has grown notably over the past year, with monthly application revenue reaching ~$835k and monthly DEX volumes growing to over $5B, both at new all time highs.

article-image

Bitwise CEO Hunter Horsley tells Blockworks that it tapped a third party to provide the reports

article-image

If pump.fun is a success, NYSE may have to return to a six-day workweek

article-image

One wallet bought pump.fun’s token from 500 different addresses

article-image

Asset allocator says fee compression could be a challenge as Grayscale converts more crypto funds to ETFs

article-image

The Stripe-acquired firm has big plans for a streamlined, multi-wallet future

article-image

Both founders of the former crypto lender have now landed in new crypto industry roles