Symbiosis exploit exposes Bitcoin bridge risk without touching Bitcoin itself

Symbiosis shut down its native Bitcoin bridge on Friday after an attacker exploited its BridgeV2 contract to mint a huge amount of unbacked synthetic BTC. Yet the attacker managed to extract only about $336,000 in real value.

The importance of that gap cannot be overlooked. It is important to emphasize that Bitcoin’s security was not compromised, rather it is the infrastructure by which BTC crosses into DeFi that proved to be vulnerable.

This incident occurred only days after the Liquid Network breach that resulted in a loss of $320 million, thus making one wonder just how safe the cross-chain infrastructure is after making the observation that Bitcoin is secure, yet its bridges are failing repeatedly.

BTC routes halted while the rest of the network stayed open

Symbiosis revealed on X that it found evidence of the Bitcoin Bridge attack on September 11 at about 04:28 UTC and stopped BTC routing right away. However, other routing protocols continued to function.

In the Delta Incident Archive, the incident is classified as DCI-2026-304, which says that BridgeV2 processed an incorrect message that led to more than 2^62 syBTC being generated on BNB Chain and Ethereum.

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