- Hyperliquid DEX had to temporarily close its bridge to Arbitrum after erroneous data from multiple RPC calls resulted in loss of synchronization between Arbitrum and Ethereum.
- The emergency shutdown was triggered by a built-in security mechanism aimed at protecting user resources. Although the outage lasted approximately four hours, no funds were at risk and the validators unanimously decided to temporarily lock the bridge.
- To prevent similar false alarms in the future, Hyperliquid plans to improve the RPC monitoring and verification infrastructure.
this monday Hyperliquidone of the most prominent decentralized platforms for the permanent exchange of contracts, faced an unforeseen situation regarding its bridge Arbitrationone of the largest layer 2 solutions on Ethereum.
THE The hyperfluidic bridge underwent emergency closure after validators receive bad data from multiple remote calls (RPCs).
This morning the Hyperliquid bridge validators voted for an emergency lock that will prevent any deposits or withdrawals for 4 hours.
The team has yet to share an official statement, but it appears that no user property was stolen.
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Exception outage: data sync challenges
Hyperliquid explained that this incident was caused by a an extremely rare technical anomaly. One of the pseudonymous developers of the project, iliensincreported that the suite of RPCs, protocols for connecting users and applications to blockchain nodes, provided inconsistent data. This led to loss of sync between the state of the Arbitrum blockchain and the state of Layer 1 where transactions are verified.
This loss of sync automatically activated the emergency locking mechanismwhich is used as a last resort to protect users’ funds. Hyperliquid clarified that although the outage lasted approximately four hours, no funds were at risk.
Reinforced protection mechanisms
THE the Hyperliquid-Arbitrum bridge experienced two phases of lockdown. After the first, which lasted four hours, a second, shorter one came about an hour after the reopening of the bridge. This locking mechanism is based on Hyperliquid L1 validators which continuously monitor the state of the Arbitrum blockchain through several main RPCs. If these validators detect irregularities, they can vote to close the bridge immediately to prevent a possible security breach.
The incident was able to highlight the robustness of the security protocol implemented by the company Hyperliquid. Indeed, though only two validators are required to vote to close the bridgethe four active validators unanimously decided to temporarily lock the bridge.
A false positive, but a necessary warning signal
The global locking mechanism is conservative because the loss of user resources is a much worse outcome than occasional downtime.
According to iliensincPUSH bridge closure was actually a false positive triggered by inconsistent data coming from the RPC set that provided out-of-phase information. This type of time lag between endpoints is not uncommon in a high-speed network like Arbitrum, but it is extremely rare for multiple RPCs to exactly match this stale data. This triggered the lockdown.
Although the situation was a false positive, Hyperliquid clarified that the blocking mechanism remains a essential measuresbecause the loss of user resources would be a much more serious scenario than an outage of several hours. It was also the first incident of its kind since the launch of the platform, which displays a locked-up total value of nearly $700 million.
Corrective Actions and Safety Assurances
To prevent this type of incident from happening again, Hyperliquid announced that the monitoring process would be improved. The goal is to prevent future false positive triggers without compromising user safety. An update to the RPC infrastructure is also planned to better manage these edge cases.
Despite this disruption, it is important to emphasize that all user assets remained secure. Hyperliquid was able to respond quickly with the help of the Arbitrum team to identify and resolve the issue.
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