BNB Chain Halts Operations Following Massive Exploit

Binance’s signature Binance Smart Chain is the latest to suffer from an exploit, and the chain is “temporarily paused,” according to the official BNB Chain Twitter account and Binance’s CZ.

Early hours following the hack look to show 2M BNB, or over $500M at time of publishing, through the Binance Bridge. Furthermore, many have criticized the response around the matter. Let’s take a look at the details we know thus far.

Binance Bridge Can’t Avoid The ‘Bridge Problem’ 

One of the biggest issues around crypto vulnerabilities often seems to be bridges – where movement from one chain to another adds a layer of complexity that has proved to be a challenge. According to Paradigm researcher @samczsun (who provides a detailed thread on the the exploit), the BSC Token Hub bridge was tricked to send the attacker two transactions of 1M BNB each.

However, in early reports it seems that the tokens were not owned user tokens, but rather tokens not in existence before the exploit.

Binance's BNB token faced impacts from today's exploit. | Source: BNB-USD on TradingView.com

Criticism Around Halting The Chain

BSC reps went on to explain that they “coordinated with validators to temporarily suspend BSC,” which led to many critics emerging around the degree of centralization surrounding the chain. It seems that today’s hack is the second largest in history, and while Binance CEO Changpeng ‘CZ’ Zhao has assured holders that their funds are safe, there’s still a lot to discover here.