Verus: Its Ethereum Bridge Was Robbed Twice in 66 Days, $7.54M the Second Time

On the night of 18 May 2026, someone emptied the vault that links the Verus blockchain to Ethereum. Sixty-six days later, after the community had got most of the money back and put some of it back in the same vault, a different thief emptied it again.

The first raid took about $11.5 million. The second, on 23 July, took about $7.54 million, according to the security firm Blockaid; CertiK put it at $7.53 million. The July thief was never offered a deal and never gave anything back. Within about 90 minutes the loot had been swapped into 3,916 ETH, Ethereum's own coin, and was being fed into Tornado Cash, a mixing service that pools many people's deposits so that what comes out cannot be matched to what went in.

Verus is a small, older blockchain with its own coin, VRSC, and no venture capital behind it. It is run by volunteers and a foundation, with Mike Toutonghi as its lead developer. Its bridge to Ethereum is best pictured as a currency exchange booth with a till on each side of a border: a user hands coins in on the Verus side, and the booth pays out the equivalent from its Ethereum till. The Ethereum till held the real assets that backed Verus users' balances. When it was raided, those balances stopped being fully backed.

The first raid, and a deal

PeckShield, a blockchain security firm, listed what left in May: 103.6 tBTC (a token that stands in for bitcoin on Ethereum), 1,625 ETH and 147,000 USDC (a digital dollar, each token redeemable for one US dollar). The attacker swapped it all into about 5,402 ETH. The gas money for the attack, the small fee every Ethereum transaction needs, arrived through Tornado Cash about 14 hours earlier.

Verus took the route many robbed projects now take. On 21 May its team posted terms on X: send back 4,052.4 ETH within 24 hours, keep 1,350 ETH (25 per cent, about $2.8 million) as a "bounty", and the community would halt investigations and not press charges. The next day PeckShield saw 4,052.4 ETH, about $8.5 million, land in a Verus wallet. The attacker kept the rest, as offered.

That left a hole. In its own release notes, Verus said the network had lost about 26.6 per cent of the ETH and tBTC held in the Ethereum contract, so the Verus-side versions of those coins were only 73.4 per cent backed. A mandatory software update on 7 July began a "restoration", and on 8 July about 1,192 of the recovered ETH was moved back into the bridge contract, according to the security writers at Rekt. Users who lost money were offered not cash but a "restitution currency": a token that pays out over time from fees the bridge earns, so repayment depends on the bridge being used.

The second raid

On 23 July a new wallet, with no visible link to the May attacker, called one function on the Ethereum contract, the one that processes incoming transfers from Verus, and was paid out from reserves that nothing on the Verus side had sent. In one transaction it took ETH, tBTC, USDC, USDT (another digital dollar), EURC (a digital euro), MKR (the voting token of the Maker lending system, roughly a share with a vote), scrvUSD (a savings version of the Curve digital dollar) and DAI, the digital dollar the bridge had minted against its own Maker position.

Blockaid said the attack used the same contract, the same entry path and the same class of flaw as May. That is how the story was first told: the same bug, twice. The Verus developers later said it was not quite that.

How the bridge was drained

The bridge does not take anyone's word. Before the Ethereum till pays, it checks a proof. Verus miners and stakers regularly publish a signed summary of the Verus ledger, a kind of fingerprint of every recent transaction, and a panel of notaries signs off on it. The Ethereum contract stores that fingerprint. Any payout request must then be shown to fit inside it, much as a line on a bank statement must add up to the closing balance.

In a write-up linked from its official release on 1 August, the Verus team explained what went wrong. The summary the notaries signed could, in principle, list the same entry twice. Verus's own software reads such a form and keeps the first answer. The Ethereum contract kept the last one. The July attacker posted a summary with a second, hand-made entry tucked inside. Verus nodes ignored the extra entry, so the notaries saw nothing wrong and signed. The Ethereum contract read the same signed data, swapped in the attacker's entry, and so accepted a fingerprint of a ledger that existed nowhere. Against that fake ledger, a fake transfer checked out perfectly.

The May attack used a different trick: it placed a real transaction on Verus that the Ethereum contract read as a different kind of record from the one Verus thought it was. The common thread, the team wrote, was that the two sides did not read the same data in the same way. Its words were blunt: the developers had "failed to perfectly match" Verus's data format inside Ethereum's code. No keys were stolen and no encryption was broken in either attack.

The same day, two other projects were hit. AFX Trade lost about $24.15 million and B2 Network about $3.86 million, taking the day's total to about $35.55 million on figures from Lookonchain, an on-chain analytics account.

Where things stand

As of 16 October 2026, the July money has not been recovered and no attacker has been named or charged. Verus said it would treat the July loss the same way as May's, replacing 99.9 per cent of the lost currency with restitution tokens. Valu, a backer of the project that had itself lost heavily, pledged to cover 0.1 per cent of the losses, about $30,000 a month for three months towards core costs, and at least $50,000 of USDC for a planned cash on-ramp.

The team has shipped a run of "critical security" updates: on 1 August, 23 August after what it called a month of near-daily AI and human auditing, and 17 September. The September release still described the Ethereum contract upgrade as upcoming, so the bridge had not reopened. The planned fix adds a waiting period of 8 or 12 hours before any payout, during which witnesses can confirm the transfer really exists on Verus or stop it. The team has not commissioned a paid outside audit, saying it cannot afford one and that audit firms misdescribed the July attack anyway.

The total value locked in Verus, the money users had parked in it, was close to $100 million at the start of 2025, according to DefiLlama data cited by CoinDesk. By the July raid it was about $9 million.