BNB Chain suffered a severe exploit on Thursday when a large amount of tokens from BSC Token Hub were moved to an unknown wallet. At the time of writing, this wallet address holds more than $291M in BNB and $421M in other tokens in the BNB Chain ecosystem. BSCScan has marked this wallet as “BNB Bridge Attacker”.
According to multi-chain portfolio tracker DeBank, the total stolen funds from BSC Token Hub are 2M BNB (~$586M loss). However, the true losses may be much lower. A spokesperson for Binance-backed blockchain BNB Chain estimated the incident involved $100 million to $110 million of digital tokens but at least $7 million was already frozen. The bridge has been suspended.
CEO of Binance Changpeng Zhao then confirmed this incident on Twitter:
“An exploit on a cross-chain bridge, BSC Token Hub, resulted in extra BNB. We have asked all validators to temporarily suspend BSC. The issue is contained now. Your funds are safe. We apologize for the inconvenience and will provide further updates accordingly.”
Changpeng Zhao also gave an estimate of the damage from the attack at around $100 million, which is lower than the amount of tokens in the hacker’s wallet: “The current impact estimate is around $100m USD equvilent, about a quarter of the last BNB burn.”
BNB Token is plummeting due to the hack. BSC Token Hub is the 5th exploit targeting cross-chain projects in 2022. Previously, Solana’s Wormhole was stolen $325 million, Axie Infinity’s Ronin ($622 million), Harmony Bridge ($100 million) and Ethereum’s Nomad Bridge ($176 million).
Binance was once attacked in May 2019 with estimated damage of $40.7M. The exchange then had to compensate all users as well as overhaul the entire security and risk management mechanism.
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