Taiko's Bridge Drops Beats and Picks Up $1.7M Worth of Receipts

Ethereum layer-2 network Taiko reopened its cross-chain bridge on Thursday, roughly 11 days after a June exploit drained up to $1.7 million from the protocol's contracts. The project said users could once again move funds to and from the network and that every affected user had been made whole. The bridge was brought back online following a four-stage recovery plan that included patching the vulnerability, replenishing reserves to full 1:1 backing, restoring layer-2 network activity, and subjecting the fix to an independent security review.

The exploit stemmed from a compromised SGX signing key mistakenly exposed on GitHub, which allowed an attacker to forge withdrawal proofs and take roughly $1.7 million from the bridge and ERC20 Vault contracts. The network then halted operations to deploy security fixes and verify that the chain's finalized state contained no forged checkpoints or attacker claims that could still be executed. According to Taiko, the changes were submitted through its security council and reviewed by independent security experts.

Reopening was accompanied by what the project described as conservative withdrawal quotas, in place as a temporary safeguard. Taiko did not disclose the size of the quotas and said the limits are not expected to prevent users from carrying out bridge transactions. It also did not disclose how the bridge's 1:1 backing was restored or whether any of the stolen assets were recovered, and said a full postmortem will be published.

"The bridge is open. You can move funds to and from Taiko again. Our response is complete: the network is fully restored and every user is whole," Taiko said on X, adding that any limits in place "won't affect normal use" and that users should trust only announcements from its official account. The project's native TAIKO token briefly surged to about $0.35 following the bridge reopening before retreating to roughly $0.14. Blockchain security companies attributed approximately $1.7 million in crypto assets to the attacker and said bridge exploits involving exposed keys remain a persistent challenge across the industry in 2026.