The Binance bridge was hacked, hundreds of millions of dollars in damage

BSC Token Hub, the bridge of one of the most popular blockchains today, was exploited by hackers with a confirmed loss of about 100 million USD.

Early this morning, the digital currency community was shocked by the news that BNB Chain and BSC Token Hub were hacked. An unusual amount of the platform's governance token, Binance Coin (BNB), was transferred to wallets. BSC Token Hub is a bridge that connects the BNB Beacon Chain chain using the BEP2 token standard with the BNB Chain chain using the BEP20 or BSC (Binance Smart Chain) token standard.

Binance is the latest platform to be attacked by hackers. Photo: HackRead

Data from BscScan shows that a series of transactions moved a large amount of tokens from the BSC Token Hub to an unknown wallet address. This wallet, labeled as "in use in a BNB bridge attack" by BscScan, currently contains approximately $289 million in BNB tokens out of a total of $421 million in tokens in the BNB Chain ecosystem.

Meanwhile, according to DeBank's statistics, the hacker may have transferred $89.5 million worth of digital currency to other ecosystems such as Ethereum, Fantom, Avalanche and liquidity pools to disperse before the transaction was frozen. . DeBank estimates that the hacker stole about two million BNB tokens, or more than $580 million.

PeckShield, a blockchain security company, agrees with DeBank's numbers. The unit estimated the damage at about 586 million USD. PeckShield was also the first to detect the attack and report it to Binance.

The attacker's wallet address is alerted on BscScan.

On Twitter this morning, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ) confirmed the system was compromised. "The BSC Token Hub cross-chain bridge has been hacked. We have requested the network in BSC to shut down, the issue is being worked on and users' funds are still safe. We apologize for the inconvenience. this and will update the information next time", CZ tweeted.

He later said that it was estimated that the attack could cause about $100 million in damage, much lower than the tokens in the hacker's wallet. "This number is only equivalent to the amount of BNB 'burned' by Binance in the most recent quarter," he stated.

The BNB token price dropped by nearly 8% after the attack, from $298 per coin to $278. Currently, this digital currency has recovered to 284 USD per coin.

The attack on BSC Token Hub is the fifth hack in just 2022 involving cross-chain bridge projects. Before that, a series of similar cases were done with hundreds of millions of dollars in damages, such as Ronin of Axie Infinity ($622 million), Wormhole on Solana blockchain ($325 million), Ethereum's Nomad Bridge ($176 million) or Harmony Bridge by Harmony ($100 million).

In May 2019, Binance was hacked and took away about 7,000 Bitcoins, equivalent to more than 40 million USD at that time. The company admitted to having stolen API snippets, two-factor authentication codes and other information from multiple user accounts. The hack affected about 2% of all Bitcoins the exchange held at the time.

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