What if stolen admin keys drain a cross-chain bridge's reserves?
Admin-key theft draining a bridge's locked reserves leaves wrapped tokens unbacked, so the depeg races across every chain holding the synthetic — ETH leads down on beta as collateral is dumped to cover. Rhymes with Ronin (Mar-2022, ~$625m) and Wormhole (Feb-2022, $325m): native token gapped 15-25% intraday before a backstop bid. Forward angle: post-2022 bridges are better insured/multisig-hardened, so a clean admin-key compromise (not a contract bug) is the residual tail that backstops don't cover.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 6–18 months horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a risk-off shock. Stolen admin keys let attackers drain a cross-chain bridge's locked reserves, leaving wrapped tokens unbacked across chains. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Crypto confidence ▼ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.