#Gate广场五月交易分享

The security gloom in the cryptocurrency market has once again cast a shadow, as the cross-chain bridge— a key hub in the blockchain ecosystem— has once again become a hotspot for hacker attacks. On May 14th, Beijing time, the TAC official announced unexpectedly that the TON side of its cross-chain layer was targeted by precise external hacker attacks. In a short period, digital assets worth $2.8 million were completely stolen. This sudden security crisis disrupted the project’s development rhythm and once again tightened the security nerves of the entire crypto industry.

The attack came suddenly and without warning, breaking the smooth operation of the TAC project. According to official disclosures, hackers precisely targeted vulnerabilities in the TON side of the TAC cross-chain bridge and launched an attack, successfully transferring a large amount of user assets. The stolen assets included USDT, BLUM, and tsTON among other mainstream cryptocurrencies, totaling approximately $2.8 million. Fortunately, the scope of this attack was relatively limited; the TAC native token, the TON mainnet token, and all ERC-20 tokens bridged from Ethereum were unaffected. The cross-chain bridge has now urgently suspended all services to prevent further losses. The project team also immediately coordinated with global law enforcement agencies to track the flow of stolen funds and attempt to recover the assets.

A loss of $2.8 million is undoubtedly a heavy blow for the TAC project. This amount not only represents an important liquidity support for the project ecosystem but also involves the real money of countless ordinary users. After the attack, affected users fell into panic, market doubts arose one after another, and the project’s reputation suffered an unprecedented impact. Faced with user anxiety and market pressure, the TAC team quickly introduced an emergency compensation plan. To fully compensate users’ losses and rapidly restore normal liquidity of the cross-chain bridge, the project foundation plans to sell the team-held TAC token treasury reserves through a legally compliant structured approach, using these funds to fill the funding gap and ensure users’ assets are not at risk of loss.

The launch of this compensation plan may seem like a helpless move to quell the crisis, but it actually harbors multiple risks. If the team sells tokens on a large scale, it will inevitably directly impact the secondary market price of TAC tokens. Under the imbalance of supply and demand, the token price is likely to experience significant fluctuations, potentially triggering panic selling, which would further worsen the project’s already difficult situation. On one side, user losses need to be compensated urgently; on the other, the token price faces the risk of collapse. The TAC team finds itself in a dilemma, which also reflects the widespread security and survival challenges currently faced by the cross-chain bridge sector.

All along, cross-chain bridges, as “bridges” connecting different blockchain networks, bear the core function of asset cross-chain transfer. Holding vast amounts of digital assets, they are naturally “targets” for hackers. In recent years, security incidents involving cross-chain bridges have been frequent, from past large-scale thefts to the precise attack on TAC. Each incident exposes core issues such as technical vulnerabilities and security audit deficiencies. Even as the industry continuously upgrades security measures, hackers’ attack methods are also evolving. Cross-chain bridges seem to have become a difficult problem for the crypto industry to solve.