Arbitrum protocol AFX Trade hit by $24 million bridge exploit: Blockaid

AFX Trade, an Arbitrum-based protocol, suffered a bridge exploit that drained about $24.15 million in USDC. Security firms Blockaid and PeckShield said the attacker moved the stolen funds from Arbitrum to Ethereum and swapped them into 12,467 ETH, worth roughly $24 million. Offchain Labs CEO Steven Goldfeder said Arbitrum’s native bridge was not hacked; the incident appears to have originated from a third-party protocol bridge operated by AFX. The event is a bearish development for DeFi security sentiment and may increase scrutiny on bridge design and protocol-level controls across Layer 2 ecosystems.