zkLink: Nova contract under sustained attack; 20% white-hat bounty offered

zkLink, a project focused on aggregated Rollup infrastructure, has announced that its Layer 3 aggregated network, zkLink Nova, is under an ongoing attack targeting the Arbitrator contracts deployed on Ethereum and Optimism. According to zkLink, its technical team has activated an emergency response protocol to contain the impact, prevent further losses, and will provide timely updates to the community. The project urges all parties to immediately cease any further interaction with zkLink Nova’s smart contracts across all chains and proactively return funds compromised in the attack. zkLink explicitly states that attackers who cooperate by returning the stolen funds will receive a white-hat bounty equal to 20% of the returned amount—and will face no further liability upon confirmation of fund receipt. Earlier, security firm Blockaid detected that the attacker exploited a publicly available relay to submit forged batch roots on the Ethereum mainnet, thereby triggering an anomaly in zkLink Nova’s L1 security mechanism.