Wallet Linked to Nomad Bridge Hack Transfers $36M of Ether to Tornado Cash

As a seasoned analyst with over two decades of experience in the financial sector, I’ve seen my fair share of shady transactions and questionable activities. However, this latest move by the so-called “Nomad Bridge Exploiter” has truly taken the cake. It’s like watching a high-stakes game of cat and mouse, where the cat keeps changing its stripes and the mouse is too busy counting its ill-gotten gold to notice.

A digital wallet connected to the theft of $200 million from the Nomad cross-chain bridge last year has recently moved 14,500 Ether, currently valued at approximately $35.5 million, to a cryptocurrency tumbler called Tornado Cash, as reported by blockchain security company PeckShield.

The data from Arkham Intelligence indicates that a sum of approximately 39.75 million DAI, a stablecoin, was deposited into the wallet on Monday. This transfer came from an account previously identified by Arkham as “Nomad Bridge Exploiter.”

Tornado Cash functions as a means to conceal financial transactions by dispersing transfers among numerous digital wallets over an extended duration. This tool, however, was restricted by the United States Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) in the year 2022.

In 2022, approximately $200 million worth of cryptocurrency was stolen from the Nomad Bridge following an attack where hackers successfully forged transactions and deceived the bridge into permitting unauthorized asset withdrawals by users who didn’t actually own these assets.

Transferring assets between different blockchains via crypto bridges has emerged as a prime target for cybercriminals, largely because of the innovative tech involved. Regrettably, the Ronin bridge and Nomad both experienced significant hacks worth $625 million within the same month.