The cryptocurrency market has once again had to deal with failures in bridges between networks. Within a span of a few hours, AFX and the Verus-Ethereum bridge accumulated estimated losses of US$ 31,69 million.
According to Blockaid, the exploit against AFX was identified around 21h30 UTC on July 22. A single transaction on Arbitrum recorded the خروج of 24,15 million USDC from the bridge operated by the decentralized trading protocol.
The AFX team immediately halted the USDC custody bridge. The protocol highlighted that the problem was restricted to a third-party component, without affecting its trading infrastructure, the main network, or Arbitrum's native bridge.
In the preliminary conclusions released on July 24, the team pointed to a combination of social engineering and infrastructure compromise. The access would have begun in a development environment and then reached internal build and validation systems.
While checking balances and trying to recover the funds, AFX is preparing corrective measures. As of July 24, nothing had been announced about a completed refund or a definitive compensation plan.
A few hours later, a transaction on Ethereum showed the Verus bridge releasing 1.137,4528 ETH along with seven token transfers. Blockaid estimated these unbacked payments at about US$ 7,54 million.
SlowMist analyzed the case and concluded that eight withdrawals were approved without verification of the corresponding assets. The flaw belongs to the same class of cross-chain validation exploited in May, although the mechanisms used were different.
B² Network, meanwhile, reported a different situation: unauthorized access hit the upgrade authority of the staking contract. The network paused staking during the reviews, said the problem was contained, and promised full compensation.
As an alternative, B² opened a manual unlocking channel through the official Discord, with verified requests processed within up to one business day. The amount of the loss was not disclosed, which kept the case out of the total counted.
The three episodes hit controls that lie outside blockchain consensus: custody, bridge accounting, and contract upgrade permissions.
