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Comment by throwhauser | Hacker News Reader

> “ETH will be added over the next hours to ensure wETH is backed 1:1,” the protocol wrote.

Where would the ETH come from?

That's a very good question. Where do they get a quarter of a billion dollars on short notice? Do they have that much of their own capital? Or are they taking this out of some other fund that nominally belongs to others?

It came from ETH owned by the bridge, essentially in a kind of escrow. That ETH is supposed to represent the tokens called "wrapped ETH" circulating on the Solana chain, in turn having been previously transferred from Ethereum through the bridge. The attack consisted of magic-ing some wrapped ETH out of thin air, then using them to release the escrowed ETH to the attacker on Ethereum.

Doesn't that mean they now have less backing than they did before?

> It came from ETH owned by the bridge, essentially in a kind of escrow.

This thread is about where the now-stolen ETH will come from (to restore 1:1 backing of wETH to ETH). Not where the stolen ETH originally came from.

Giant investors, who have put a huge amount of money into the Solana blockchain, or into the company behind the Wormhole bridge. It's also likely that these same companies/individuals were the same ones that took most of the loss anyway, so they may mostly be paying back themselves, while at the same time keeping up the value of their investments the projects.

From the looks of it, they've closed up shop and left. Their website is just a massive banner pointing to their twitter [1].

If this is temporary, than this is extremely shady behaviour for an organization handling "millions" of crypto tokens.

[1] https://portalbridge.com/

Even if they left for Cuba - it's the famous "bank the unbanked" principle in action. They will be distributing the cash among the poor! Strong fundamentals! Legit team! Bright future!

No, that's just the bridge where you can actually transfer tokens they took down. Their main website is https://wormholenetwork.com/

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