Alephium Bridge Hacked for $815,000 in 7 Minutes as Compromised Guardian Keys Enable Forged Token Transfers

The token is down approximately 1.3% over the past 24 hours, a measured response from the market given the circumstances, though one that partly reflects the contained nature of the exploit. The attack targets the bridge specifically, not the underlying Alephium chain, which continues to operate without disruption.

The more lasting damage sits in the 13.76 million wrapped ALPH now circulating without collateral backing. Those tokens represent a liability that cannot simply be wished away. Any future bridge restart will need to account for that uncollateralized supply and the questions it raises about redemption, burn mechanisms, and user trust in wrapped assets on the Ethereum side.

The bridge is down and the attacker has not moved the funds. Whether that pause is strategic or simply the beginning of a longer laundering process remains to be seen. What the Alephium team needs to do now is straightforward, even if it is not easy: publish a full technical post-mortem, clarify the discrepancy between its early event-emission characterization and the key compromise evidence, and lay out a concrete plan for how the bridge gets rebuilt, with a guardian set large enough to actually provide security.

A four-guardian bridge with a three-of-four signing threshold is not a bridge design that belongs in production. Whatever comes next for Alephiums cross-chain infrastructure needs to start from that acknowledgment.