The Verus Ethereum Bridge has been hit by a second exploit in what investigators describe as an arithmetic logic failure deep inside the cross-chain protocol. An attacker leveraged a deposit of just 0.01 VRSC , worth fractions of a cent , to trigger massive, unbacked payouts from the bridge contract.

Blockchain forensics shows the exploit yielded 1,137 ETH, 71.5 tBTC, and an assortment of other tokens, collectively valued at approximately $7.5 million at the time of withdrawal. The attacker appears to have identified a precision flaw in the bridge’s minting logic, where the system accepted the minimal deposit as valid collateral and issued a vastly disproportionate amount of wrapped assets on the Ethereum side.

The exploit marks the second major breach of the Verus Ethereum Bridge, raising serious questions about the protocol’s security posture. Unlike many cross-chain attacks that rely on compromised validator keys or private key theft, this incident originated from a vulnerability in the core accounting mechanism , an area that should have been hardened after the first incident.

Verus developers have not yet published a post-mortem, but the attack vector suggests the bridge failed to properly scale or validate deposit amounts against the corresponding minted output. Security researchers are urging projects that share similar architectural patterns to review their mint-and-burn functions before they become the next target.

For CoinBatmi readers, the lesson is clear: repeating the same class of exploit is no longer an accident , it is a pattern. The onus is now on the Verus team to demonstrate how they will prevent a third.