zkLink Nova bridge hack: 705,309 DAI of the stolen money sits on three wallets, untouched since 9 November

The exploiter's address 0xaca0655a11200a80d33d0e48786317304cde5718 got its first gas, 0.027 ETH, from FixedFloat's hot wallet at 15:49 UTC on 28 October. Over the next hours it made a small test deposit and sent a message through the bridge. At 22:21:35 one transaction released the contents of the Nova escrow 0xad16edcf7deb7e90096a259c81269d811544b6b6 to it: 245.7 pufETH, 12.57 ezETH, 18,113 USDC, 6.87 rsETH, 6.3 STONE, 0.17 WBTC, 3,361 USDT, smaller amounts of mswETH, mstETH, wstETH and rswETH, and 22.43 ETH. Blockaid and SlowMist describe the method: a forged batch root, pushed through a public relayer, that made the bridge treat the attacker's withdrawals as proven.

Within forty minutes the attacker redeemed the pufETH for WETH and sold the rest through Curve and MetaMask Swaps. By 23:01 it held about 306 ETH, and sent it out in three pieces: 101 ETH, 100 ETH and 102.06 ETH, plus 32,158 DAI to the third wallet.

Between 00:21 and 00:56 on 29 October each of the three relays, 0x211b4aebefea02470587286b398ed28fb7e09c6a, 0x2d5a8aabf7af4022e314eb2a54753ba2402bafb0 and 0x75dcf3395b6cbefc6b66b28d6d93f193b58dc0f3, sold its ether for DAI. A small part was sold back to ETH and sent to exchanges (below). Then nothing happened for eleven days.

On 9 November between 14:34 and 14:48 UTC each relay moved its DAI to a new address: 268,344 DAI to 0xa5be3ee19a993aeaf6185d3d9a06128d372a90a6 (which now holds 271,499 DAI), 211,963 DAI to 0xe6578a2a2b17c6aa043c9d83d6e6a0024b1522aa and 221,848 DAI to 0x44f32242e54699d3bcce65460336b4bb33c4d5cf. That is 705,309 DAI, roughly 90% of the reported loss, in three plain wallets. DAI cannot be frozen by its issuer, so these funds stay where they are until the attacker moves them. Every one of these wallets also receives fake "ETH" and "DAI" tokens from address-poisoning bots; those are noise, not the attacker's money.

About 65,600 DAI was sold back to ether and, together with the leftovers, about 27.8 ETH went into six FixedFloat deposit addresses on 29 October, in amounts of 2 to 5.8 ETH. FixedFloat is also where the attacker's first gas came from. Another 5,000 DAI went through 0x791a1cff9f9431ef98ca25c2e31ecb92a8ac2f25 to a ChangeNOW address. Both are instant exchanges: they keep order records that police can request, and nothing else in this case is held by a company.

It does not say who the attacker is, and it does not say that FixedFloat, ChangeNOW, Curve or MetaMask did anything wrong: they are services the money passed through. Blockaid's and SlowMist's descriptions of the bug and the loss estimates in the press are theirs. The path of the money and the balances are PublicAML's own reading of Ethereum on 10 November 2026.