Author: Haotian

In the asset tracking analysis report of Bybit's stolen assets disclosed yesterday by SlowMist and the Cosine Security team, it was mentioned that a total of 15,000 cmETH was successfully prevented from being withdrawn by the mETH Protocol, recovering a loss of $42 million. Many friends must be curious about what happened here?

The mETH Protocol is a liquid staking protocol 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 second only to stETH, wBETH, and rETH.

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

cmETH is a 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 leverage risk, but it can be mined in various campaigns on layer2 to earn its new governance token, $COOK.

In short, cmETH is a proof-of-stake asset circulating in the layer2 network, which interacts and combines with various layer2 protocols.

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

1. Address Blacklist Mechanism: As the name suggests, it can quickly blacklist addresses marked as hackers to restrict their transfers or interactions with cmETH assets.
2. Contract Temporary Suspension: In case of emergencies, the team has the authority to temporarily suspend withdrawal operations to prevent the circulation of suspicious assets.
3. Withdrawal Delay Mechanism: It employs a FIFO (First In, First Out) queue mechanism, with a built-in withdrawal delay of up to 7 days (this incident lasted 8 hours), providing a cooling-off period for the team to identify abnormal withdrawal behaviors on-chain.

Although it seems that a certain degree of decentralization is sacrificed for security, it is important to remember that cmETH is a re-staked (leveraged) asset built on top of mETH, primarily used as a proof-of-stake asset for mining in various DeFi protocols. Its security is crucial for the overall liquidity safety across different 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 this design of cmETH did not play a role in the complex combinatorial ecosystem of on-chain DEXs, but instead, it first made a significant contribution to intercepting assets for Bybit.

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