Hackers targeting the Solana ecosystem emptied thousands of cryptocurrency wallets.
The Solana Foundation reported the theft on Wednesday after a weakness was exploited to suck away cryptocurrency from 8,000 crypto wallets where owners placed their monies. Wallet providers such as Slope and Phantom were also impacted.
The value of the stolen assets is unknown, as is the nature of the exploit.
According to PeckShield, a blockchain security service, an estimated $8 million was taken from four Solana wallets.
Elliptic, a blockchain forensics service, believes that over $5.2 million in crypto assets have been taken from more than 7,900 Solana wallets so far, but “the main reason is still not obvious,” Elliptic co-founder Tom Robinson said. “It appears to be the result of a weakness in certain wallet software rather than a flaw in the Solana blockchain itself.”
According to Solana spokesman Austin Federa, “much remains unknown at this point - except that hardware wallets are unaffected.”
While the incident may have been a supply-chain attack, the nature of the exploit remains unknown, according to Federa.
Following the attack, Solana's SOL token plummeted as much as 7.3 percent to $38.40 in early trade on Wednesday at the time of writing, according to Bloomberg, while bitcoin surged 1.3 percent to $23,327.
On Twitter, wallet providers Slope and Phantom stated that they are working to resolve the issue. “We are collaborating with other teams to investigate a suspected vulnerability in the Solana ecosystem. The team does not feel this is a Phantom-specific issue at this time. We will publish an update as soon as we have more information ”Phantom sent a tweet.
Solana has recently gained prominence as the crypto industry has credited it with greater speed and energy efficiency than the Ethereum and bitcoin blockchains.
Solana received $314 million in fundraising last year, led by Andreessen Horowitz, one of Silicon Valley's most notable venture-capital firms.
However, some cryptocurrency firms have fallen victim to hackers. Prior to Solana, bridge protocol firm Nomad suffered a $200 million loss due to a security exploit breach. Nomad is a bridge technology that allows crypto tokens to be transferred between blockchains.
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