What if attackers compromise a quorum of Wormhole's guardians?
Compromising a quorum of Wormhole guardians lets attackers forge mints and drain liquidity across every connected chain — the worst-case bridge failure, so wrapped assets depeg system-wide and ETH/SOL crater on forced selling. Rhymes directly with Wormhole's Feb-2022 $325m exploit, but a guardian-quorum compromise is larger: Jump backstopped 2022, and there's no guarantee of a backstop at this scale. Severity here is correctly maxed (crypto_confidence -1.0); this is the systemic cross-chain tail, with SOL especially exposed given Wormhole's Solana roots.
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 mixed shock. Attackers compromise a quorum of Wormhole guardians, forging mints and draining liquidity across all connected chains. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Crypto confidence ▼ · Crypto liquidity ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.