The mETH Protocol Intercepted a $42 Million Withdrawal Attempt Targeting Bybit

In the asset tracking analysis report disclosed by SlowMist and the Cosine Security team yesterday, it was mentioned that a withdrawal of 15,000

A withdrawal of 15,000 cmETH was successfully blocked by the mETH Protocol, recovering a loss of $42 million, according to an asset tracking analysis report disclosed by SlowMist and the Cosine Security team yesterday.

The mETH Protocol is a liquid staking protocol that was launched on the Ethereum mainnet by the Mantle layer2 chain to allow users to earn native yields when depositing ETH on layer2. It is a liquid staking asset with a cumulative deposit volume that is second only to stETH, wBETH, and rETH.

Mantle, with mETH as its core focus, absorbs liquidity from various layer2 chains and has become an interactive liquidity scheduling center for layer2. One can imagine how strategically important mETH is to the Mantle chain.

cmETH is the re-staked asset of mETH, meaning users can re-stake their circulating mETH assets to exchange for cmETH assets. Compared to mETH, cmETH carries an additional re-staking (leveraged) risk but can be mined in various layer2 campaign activities to earn its new governance token $COOK.

In short, cmETH is an asset representing rights that circulates in the layer2 network, interacting and combining with various layer2 protocols.

Due to this complex business interaction logic, the cmETH protocol has incorporated three key security mechanisms in its design:

Although it seems that a certain degree of decentralization has been sacrificed for security, it should be noted that cmETH is a re-staked (leveraged) asset built on top of mETH, primarily used as a rights certificate for mining in various DeFi protocols, and its security is crucial for the overall liquidity safety across cross-chain and cross-protocol systems. At this stage, as an important component of the Mantle ecosystem, it is reasonable to consider and design additional security mechanisms to respond to hacker attacks and emergencies.

It was just unexpected that the design of cmETH did not play a role in the complex combinatorial ecosystem of on-chain DEX but instead made a significant contribution by intercepting assets for Bybit.