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- Gravity Bridge halted operations after a reported $5.4 million exploit hit the protocol.
- PeckShield said stolen assets included USDC, WETH, USDT, and PAX Gold tokens.
- The incident renewed concerns over cross-chain bridge security across the DeFi sector.
Gravity Bridge was reportedly drained of about $5.4 million after suspicious withdrawals hit the Ethereum-Cosmos bridge. Validators halted operations during the investigation. Early reports said the bridge contract key may have been compromised, raising immediate concerns over transfer security controls.
On-chain analyst Specter flagged the outflows in a Saturday post on X. He said the Gravity Bridge contract key may have been compromised. His post linked that possible breach to the reported $5.4 million theft.
Gravity Bridge Exploit Funds Move Through Exchanges
Security firm PeckShield also reported the exploit and listed the stolen assets. The largest portion was about $4.3 million in USDC. The haul also included 274 WETH, about $434,000 in USDT, and 14.164 PAXG.
PeckShield also monitored movement after the funds exited the bridge. A significant portion of the proceeds went through ChangeNow and Binance, it said. At the time of the firm’s update, the stolen wallet contained approximately 2,102 ETC, valued at approximately $4.23 million.
Gravity Bridge admitted the incident on X without specifying a technical reason. The team informed validators to temporarily stop validators and orchestrators until the issue is addressed. A subsequent post verified that the bridge was stopped.
The protocol processes transfers in and out of the Cosmos ecosystem to and from Ethereum. Users are able to transfer assets from Ethereum to the wallets and decentralized exchanges of Cosmos. Cosmos-based assets have the ability to rejoin Ethereum platforms like Uniswap.
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According to Gravity Bridge, its design has the entire validator set verifying transfers. It is different from bridges with multisignatures or a private group of nodes. Its native token, Graviton, is utilized by validators to assist with securing the bridge.
GRAV Price Falls After Gravity Bridge Exploit
CoinMarketCap data shows Graviton (GRAV) is trading lower following the incident. The token is trading at $0.0007050. This represented a 6.75% decline in the last 24 hours.
This exploit contributed to the overall worries surrounding the security of cross-chain bridges. In April, analysts from JPMorgan stated that bridge security is still a significant problem in DeFi. This raised doubts about DeFi’s ability to scale to satisfy institutional demand.
This warning came after a series of bridge incidents occurring in 2026. The Versus-Ethereum bridge attack was the eighth significant bridge exploit of the year. The total losses from those accidents stood at $328.6 million.
The DeFi sector is under stress since KelpDAO’s breach in April. Roughly $290 million was stolen during the attack, and the Lazarus Group in North Korea was blamed for the heist. TVL in DeFi then dropped from almost $100 billion to around $86 billion in just two days.
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