Earlier in Feb, the Wormhole bridge between Solana and Ethereum was exploited, causing $321M worth of unbacked wrapped ether (120K wETH) to be fraudulently minted on Solana. This was the second largest DeFi hack ever.

Bridges are an attractive target for hackers: they hold millions of dollars of tokens in what is essentially an escrow contract, and by operating across multiple chains, they multiply their potential points of failure.

Here's a quick overview of what bridges are, why it is important to understand how they work, and their design trade-offs.

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