What if attackers forge a Wormhole quorum and mint unbacked assets?
A forged Wormhole guardian quorum minting unbacked wrapped assets is a bridge-solvency catastrophe: drained liquidity and counterfeit collateral hit ETH (-5.7%) and Solana hardest given Wormhole's role there, with BTC following on systemic fear. This is the Feb-2022 Wormhole $320m exploit template — last time the backer recapitalized and contained it. The variable is whether anyone backstops the hole again; without a deep-pocketed guarantor, the wrapped-asset depeg becomes permanent and contagion widens.
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 0–6 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 forge a Wormhole guardian quorum signature, minting unbacked wrapped assets across multiple chains and draining bridge liquidity before guardians revoke. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Crypto confidence ▼ · Crypto liquidity ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.