Ethereum Bridges Breached: $31.7M Lost, Staking Halted

At least $31.7 million in losses were reported across two Ethereum bridges within hours of each other, and a third protocol halted staking due to unauthorized access.

The incidents occurred on July 22, with Blockaid detecting the AFX exploit at 21:30 UTC. An Arbitrum transaction showed 24.15 million USDC leaving the bridge operated by AFX, a decentralized trading protocol on Arbitrum.

AFX suspended its USDC custody bridge and stated that the incident was isolated from its trading infrastructure, mainnet, and the Arbitrum network. The affected component was a third-party bridge, not Arbitrum's native bridge.

Preliminary findings published by AFX attributed the incident to coordinated social engineering and infrastructure compromise, with access appearing to begin in a development environment before escalating into internal build infrastructure and validator systems.