BNB Chain Halted After Suspected Hack, $536M Compromised

A wallet worth over $536 million started acting erratically, prompting the BNB Chain to halt completely.

BNB Chain Halted After Suspected Hack, $536M Compromised
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Key Takeaways

  • About $536 million in assets was compromised in a suspected hack on a BNB chain wallet.
  • The wallet has demonstrated erratic on-chain behavior with unknown motivation.
  • BNB Chain has paused its services in response.

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BNB Chain has been halted after a large BNB holder started displaying erratic on-chain behavior, suggesting a hack.

BNB Chain Compromised

On-chain data suggests a large holder of BNB was hacked. At around 17:30 UTC the wallet began withdrawing sizeable sums of coins it had staked from various blockchain ecosystems. It subsequently started swapping and borrowing tokens from a multitude of different protocols in a very rapid fashion. At the time of writing, the wallet controls over $536,930,715 in various assets.

The erratic nature of the wallet’s on-chain activity suggests it may have been compromised. Stablecoin issuer Tether has also already stepped in to blacklist the address, preventing it from sending USDT to new wallets.

At time of writing, the wallet owned 1,020,094.7687 BNB (about $287,870,744), 33,772 in ETH and wETH (about $45,696,989), and approximately $63 million in stablecoins including USDT, BUSD, USDC, and fUSDT. The wallet also has over $127.7 million in assets locked across lending protocols Venus, Geist, and Trader Joe.

The BNB Chain’s official Twitter account indicated the chain would be halted due to “irregular activity.” 

Update: BNB Chain suffered a $566 million exploit on its token bridge late Thursday. Read our full report on the incident here.

Disclaimer: At the time of writing, the author of this piece owned BTC, ETH, and several other cryptocurrencies.

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