On May 18, 2026, the so-called "decentralized and secure" Verus-Ethereum Bridge suffered a fatal breach on the Ethereum side: attackers allegedly exploited a forged Merkle proof to pass the verification logic of this yet-to-be-open-sourced bridge contract, directly withdrawing assets from the bridge. According to monitoring by PeckShield, the stolen assets included approximately 103.6 tBTC, 1,625 ETH, and 147,000 USDC, which were subsequently exchanged in batches for about 5,402.4 ETH, finally concentrating in a wallet address that starts with 0x65Cb, marked as a drainer. Cosine, co-founder of Slow Mist, initially pointed to the cause of the attack as the combination of "forged Merkle proof + black-box verification logic," but specific technical details remain to be confirmed. One is the security narrative long emphasized by the team, and the other is the cold, on-chain path of stolen assets; this typical cross-chain bridge attack first exposes the huge gap that is tearing between promotion and reality.

On-chain Path of Stolen 5,402 ETH

From the timeline, the attack was not a spur-of-the-moment decision. About 14 hours before launching the attack, the attacker extracted 1 ETH through Tornado Cash as "seed funding" for a series of subsequent transactions and interactions. Tornado Cash is often used to obfuscate the source of funds and erase direct associations with upstream addresses, meaning the attacker had already isolated their on-chain identity through a mixing tool before actually touching large assets on the bridge, indicating a clear intent of anti-tracking.

After officially launching the attack on the Verus-Ethereum Bridge and successfully withdrawing assets from the bridge contract, on-chain records show that the stolen approximately 103.6 tBTC, 1,625 ETH, and 147,000 USDC did not remain for long in the original receiving address but were successfully exchanged on-chain for about 5,402.4 ETH. After completing the unification of asset forms, this batch of ETH was concentrated into a wallet address starting with 0x65Cb, which has been marked as a drainer by PeckShield. Current public information has not revealed whether these 5,402.4 ETH further flowed to exchanges or other on-chain services, making 0x65Cb the clearest anchor point on the path of funds, as well as crucial for subsequent tracking and potential disposition efficacy.

The Bridge That Claimed No Contract Risks Is Proven Wrong

Verus had repeatedly emphasized in external introductions that its cross-chain design is "more stable" and "harder to be breached" on the smart contract security level, trying to distance itself from a batch of cross-chain solutions that failed due to contract vulnerabilities. However, this time, the attackers allegedly penetrated the verification logic of the Verus Ethereum Bridge through a meticulously constructed forged Merkle proof, treating the bridge as an ATM. This was not a mistake made by an operator pressing the wrong button; rather, the verification layer itself had problems judging "whom to trust and whom not to trust": a proof that should have been rejected was treated as truth by the unopen-sourced contract logic, thus directly opening up the asset outlet.

Cosine from Slow Mist pointed out that this incident likely exploited vulnerabilities in the unopen-sourced verification logic of the Verus Ethereum Bridge, achieving fund withdrawal through forged Merkle proofs, and technical details are still being verified. The combination of "unopen-sourced bridge contract + forged Merkle proof" quickly became the focal point of community discussions: one side presents the long-constructed safety narrative by the project team, while the other presents the facts of theft disclosed by external security companies and several Chinese media based on PeckShield data. As of now, Verus has neither provided a comprehensive review nor disclosed whether the bridge has been suspended or how it plans to stop the bleeding. For a cross-chain project that takes security as its core selling point, such silence itself is a secondary injury to credibility and user trust.

Recurrence of Old Wounds in Cross-Chain Bridges: Merkle Attacks Reemerge

In cross-chain bridge design, the Merkle proof serves the role of "proving that this message/ asset truly appeared in a certain block on a certain chain": the source chain packages cross-chain messages into a Merkle tree, with only the Merkle root saved in the block header. Once the bridge contract in the target chain receives a series of hashed paths, as long as the calculated root along the path matches the recorded Merkle root, it assumes that this message is "real and unaltered." The problem lies in that if the verification logic itself has flaws—such as incomplete verification range or improper binding to the corresponding block header or state root—attackers then have the opportunity to construct a "formally appearing correct" forged proof, deceiving the bridge's contract on the target chain and illegitimately withdrawing assets.

This is not the first time someone has targeted the Merkle proof segment. Briefings have clearly indicated that many historical cross-chain security incidents have utilized similar reasoning: not confronting the consensus layer head-on but circumventing that segment of "how to validate proof" in the business code after reaching the chain. There is a common vulnerable point among these cases—the verification module is often controlled by a small number of developers, making it difficult for external parties to conduct a comprehensive review; once a design mistake occurs, it can evolve into a single point of failure for the entire bridge. The unopen-sourced verification logic of this Verus Ethereum Bridge coincidentally amplifies such structural risks: Cosine from Slow Mist proposed that "forged Merkle proofs" may be the cause of the attack, but external parties could not publicly audit this closed-source logic in advance, only deducing the outcome through limited clues afterward; the technical dissection must wait for professional teams to disclose it, causing the cost of the "recurrence of old wounds" to fall again on users and assets.

Common Hidden Dangers of Unopen-Sourced Cross-Chain Bridges

The issues exposed by Verus this time are not just a defect in the implementation of a certain bridge but rather systemic hazards commonly existing in a class of unopen-sourced cross-chain bridges: once the contract verification logic of the bridge is made into a "black box," external audits, community peer reviews, and long-term offensive and defensive drills become impossible to discuss, leaving the security narrative as a one-way promise solely output by the project party. The key verification logic of the Verus Ethereum Bridge has remained closed-source, ultimately being allegedly bypassed by a "forged Merkle proof," essentially locking a highly complex verification element, which has historically faced multiple issues, in a room no one can see until on-chain addresses like 0x65Cb and other identifiable attacker addresses appear, with thousands of ETH concentrated and withdrawn. Only then does the outside world have the chance to reverse-engineer the process from the results, and this information asymmetry itself serves as a risk amplifier.

Cross-chain bridges act as "hubs" in a multi-chain ecosystem, one end attached to cross-chain versions of assets like tBTC, ETH, and USDC, and the other end connecting users and applications across different public chains. Once a vulnerability occurs in the verification logic layer, it does not just impact a single contract but the collapse of the entire path of funds and trust. The more practical issue is that, according to current public information, there has yet to be any systemic coordination by Verus with exchanges or other service providers to deal with the stolen assets, and details on the attack and remedy plans remain absent. After the incident, multiple security agencies and media quickly focused on reporting, indirectly indicating the industry's high sensitivity to the security of bridge-type infrastructures— for those projects relying on a few bridges to carry long-tail assets and small-scale cross-chain needs, the Verus incident serves as a direct warning: if they continue to operate under a closed-source, high complexity, and low audit transparency model, a single misstep could erase years of accumulated assets and reputation across the entire ecosystem.

Verus's Next Lessons: Transparency and Design Reconstruction

This attack directly exposes Verus’s biggest shortcoming: the core bridge contract verification logic has long been in a "black box" state, with external parties only able to deduce details afterward based on the drainer address starting with 0x65Cb and already occurred withdrawal paths. On the verification end, the project party clearly overtrusted a single mechanism of the Merkle proof, equating "passing verification" almost with "absolute safety," which contrasts sharply with the external long-constructed narrative of security. Industry experience shows that after large cross-chain incidents, project parties often conduct post-facto audits, optimize verification mechanisms, or even rebuild bridge designs entirely. For Verus, whether to open-source the verification logic, whether to involve multiple independent security teams for cross audits, and whether to add multiple validations and risk control thresholds at the protocol level will directly determine its ability to truly “graduate” from this incident. In the absence of a complete technical review and remedy plan from the official team, and with clarity on whether the bridge is paused and temporary protective configurations still ambiguous, users and observers need to closely monitor several public clues in the short term: first, the depth of breakdown regarding the cause of the attack and liability boundaries in subsequent announcements; second, whether any upgrades or permission adjustments have occurred at the bridge contract layer; third, the subsequent on-chain directions of relevant addresses such as 0x65Cb and the stolen assets; these are all key windows to judge whether the risk is converging. The theft of the Verus bridge is not an unexpected "black swan," but rather a warning drama replaying around the old issue of forged Merkle proofs. For the entire cross-chain bridge track, the only real variable remains: which projects will proactively reconstruct their security boundaries after this incident, and which will continue treating complex black boxes as safety itself.

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