Shiba Inu's Shibarium preps bridge restart and plans user refunds after $4 million exploit

Shibarium developers said Thursday they're preparing to restart the platform's Ethereum bridge and are working on a plan to reimburse users following a $4 million exploit that triggered an emergency shutdown earlier this month.

A new post-mortem from the team confirmed that all validator keys have been rotated, over 100 ecosystem contracts have been migrated to secure wallets, and 4.6 million BONE tokens were recovered from the attacker’s contract in the days following the attack.

The team said plans to make affected users whole are in development.

The exploit was triggered on Sept. 12 when a hacker submitted fake data to Shibarium's Ethereum-linked contracts, causing the system to automatically shut down as a safety measure.

At the same time, the attacker tried to gain control over the network by temporarily staking millions of dollars' worth of BONE tokens — the ecosystem’s governance token — to meet key thresholds used in validation.

The attacker drained about $4.1 million in ETH, SHIB, and 15 other tokens from the bridge, according to a Sept. 17 community update .

Shortly after the attack was discovered, Shibarium developer Kaal Dhairya said on X that authorities had been contacted, but the team was open to negotiating in "good faith" with the attacker and offered a 50 ETH bonus worth around $225,000 at the time if the stolen funds were returned.

But no deal materialized, and the attacker has since moved the stolen assets.

The price of SHIB is down 13% from the day of the attack, while BONE has lost over 43% according to The Block price data .