An attacker drained approximately $24.15 million in USDC from a bridge operated by derivatives exchange AFX Trade on July 22, emptying nearly the entire contract in a single exploit detected at 21:30 UTC, security firm Blockaid confirmed.

The bridge held around $24.2 million in USDC just before the attack, up from $19.3 million in mid-June, according to DefiLlama. That means the attacker walked away with almost everything locked in the contract. The stolen funds were quickly moved to Ethereum and converted into 12,467 ETH at an average price of $1,937 per coin, according to onchain analytics account Lookonchain, which flagged the exploiter's wallet on Arkham.

Blockaid said it is working with the Arbitrum team to track the funds and help AFX contain the damage. AFX itself had published no statement on its X account as of the time of writing.

Arbitrum's own infrastructure was not touched

Steven Goldfeder, co-founder of Offchain Labs, the company behind Arbitrum, was quick to draw a line. The exploit originated from a third-party protocol, he wrote, and Arbitrum's native bridge was not hacked or compromised in any way. His team said it would coordinate with AFX and share more details as they emerged.

AFX, which stands for Anti-Fragile Exchange, markets itself as a sovereign Layer 1 blockchain built for decentralized derivatives. It offers USDC-margined perpetual contracts with up to 100x use across crypto, equities, ETFs and commodities. All user deposits flow into the protocol through the Arbitrum-based bridge contract that was targeted.

The attack is the second major exploit to hit an Arbitrum-based protocol in July. On July 15, perpetuals exchange Ostium halted trading after an attacker manipulated its oracle system and drained up to $18 million in USDC from its liquidity vault. Two protocols, two oracle or bridge failures, within eight days on the same network.

Markets barely flinched. ETH was trading at roughly $1,928, flat over 24 hours. ARB slipped 0.3% to $0.0806, still well above its all-time low of $0.0705 set on June 26, per CoinGecko data.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice or an investment recommendation.