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Morning Edition · Thursday, August 13, 2026Published at 1:53 AM EDT · New York
Bridge Losses Keep Coming From Systems That Worked Exactly as Specified
Rekt News case files on Ostium, AFX Trade and VerusCoin describe roughly $55 million lost through compromised validator signatures and a bridge import path, not through broken contract code.
The recent case files published by Rekt News share a root cause that audits scoped to on-chain code do not cover. AFX Trade, a derivatives venue on Arbitrum, lost $24.15 million in USDC when an attacker obtained five hot-validator signature…
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Losses Move to Components That Worked as Designed
A growing share of DeFi losses will come not from buggy contract code but from components behaving exactly as specified — oracle forwarders, validator signature sets, governance votes and other trusted off-contract inputs — so audits and bug bounties scoped to on-chain code keep missing the failure surface, and protocols will be repeatedly forced to extend review, scope and monitoring to their privileged operational infrastructure.
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