Incident Report: Hyperliquid Bridge Downtime

Hyperliquid, a popular decentralized perpetual exchange, recently posted an incident report detailing the downtime of its bridge.

According to pseudonymous developer iliensinc, an "extremely rare edge case" occurred where multiple RPCs (Remote Procedure Calls), which connect users to blockchain nodes, supplied incorrect data.

The downtime affected Hyperliquid's bridge to Arbitrum, Ethereum's largest Layer 2 solution, which was inactive for about four hours. This was initiated after bridge validators voted for an emergency lock. An additional short lockup occurred approximately an hour after the bridge was reopened.

Iliensinc explained on Discord that the Arbitrum bridge was locked due to an automatic monitoring process implemented by L1 (Hyperliquid) validators, which relies on several major Arbitrum RPCs to synchronize the L1 and Arbitrum state.

Hyperliquid's documentation indicates that only two validators are needed to lock down the protocol in similar emergencies, yet all four validators opted for a temporary closure of the bridge. Abhi Pingle from Theo Network noted that this could be seen as a positive action.

The locking mechanism is designed as a last resort to prevent potential exploits and protect user funds, which would be far worse than short downtime. Iliensinc reassured that improvements will be made to the monitoring process to prevent future false positives and confirmed that all user funds are safe.

This incident marks the first downtime since Hyperliquid's launch last year, with the protocol currently holding nearly $700 million in total value locked. Like many emerging DeFi projects, Hyperliquid initially incentivized growth via points programs rewarding users with tokens.

Editor's note (12:33 p.m. ET): An earlier version of this story misstated Hyperledger as the exchange.