zkLink Nova Halts Block Production After Bridge Exploit Drains More Than $780,000
zkLink Nova, a network built by the zkLink team, stopped producing blocks after an attacker drained more than $780,000 from the bridge connecting Nova to Ethereum. In an update posted Thursday morning, zkLink said it had pushed emergency fixes to the affected contracts and temporarily disabled withdrawals while engineers review all related components. The team said services will return only after it confirms that all risks have been removed, but it did not provide a restart timeline, a confirmed loss figure, or a cause. Earlier, zkLink said the attack targeted Nova’s Arbitrator contract on both Ethereum and Optimism. It asked the attacker to stop and return the funds, offering a 20% white hat bounty and saying no further action would be taken if the assets were sent back. Onchain data reviewed by Unchained showed Nova’s escrow contract marked as paused on Ethereum by Thursday afternoon. Separate exploit transactions moved a mix of ETH and tokens, including pufETH, ezETH, and ZKL. Security firms Blockaid and SlowMist published differing but close loss estimates and described an attack path involving a forged batch root and reused message hash, though zkLink has not confirmed those accounts.








