BNB Chain, a blockchain linked to the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, Binance, reported on its Twitter account this Thursday (06) that it had to temporarily pause BSC due to what it called “irregular activities”. The team then reported that it had to suspend activities on the BSC “after determining a possible exploitation.” “All systems are now contained and we are immediately investigating the potential vulnerability. We know that the Community will help freeze any transfers. All funds are safe,” the team tweeted on Thursday night (6).
R$ 3 billion hack on BSC Chain
Information and screenshots circulating on Twitter suggest that there was a nearly $600 million hack on the BSC network. That is, more than BRL 3 billion at the current price in reais in what would be one of the biggest hacks in the cryptocurrency market in history. According to the developer known as foobar, the outage is a result of the hacker attack. “Someone at BNB [Chain] just got hacked for around 2 million BNB ($600 million USD). The attacker is throwing the funds into liquidity pools and using all possible bridges to reach more secure networks. Complete chaos on the net”, tweeted him to his more than 70 thousand followers. Next, foobar shared a screenshot showing the “diversification” of the networks.
is this diversification pic.twitter.com/1M2ER6ZRq3
— foobar (@0xfoobar) October 6, 2022
Also according to the developer and images shared by him, Tether has already placed the account identified as belonging to the attacker on the restricted list, which strongly reinforces the probability of a historical hacker attack. According to DeBank data, the address in question has more than $540 million worth of cryptocurrencies, with holdings in ETH, MATIC and FTM. However, BNB Chain reported that initial estimates for funds withdrawn from BSC are between $70 million and $80 million. “However, thanks to the community and our internal and external security partners, nearly $7 million has already been frozen.” tweeted the team.
Hack would have occurred from the native bridge of the BSC
To CriptoFácil, cryptocurrency expert Felipe Escudero explained that the suspicion is that the hacker has defrauded Binance hub, which is a native bridge of the Binance Smart Chain (BSC). “Now the hacker is trying to pass the assets to other networks to try to get out of the Binance blockchain. The attacker took 900,000 stolen BNB tokens and placed them as collateral (collateral) on Venus, the BCS lending dApp, borrowing from USDC and BUSD. From there, he is trying to send these stablecoins to other networks,” Escudero explained. According to the expert, the big question is what will happen from now on. That’s because, according to him, locking the network sets a “very obscure” precedent: “The big question now is: what will happen after the ‘unlocking’ of the network? Will you delete the hack? Back the blocks? Put the stolen money on a ‘black list’? All of this sets very nebulous precedents,” said Escudero.
BNB drops after hack information
After information about the possible hack began to circulate on networks, the price of Binance’s token, BNB, began a process of falling. The price dropped from R$1,530 to R$1,472 in less than two hours. That is, a fall of about 4%. At the time of writing this article, BNB is trading at R$1,487, according to data from CoinGecko.
BNB price chart. Source: CoinGecko – Story updated with new information provided by BNB Chain.
