The BNB Smart Chain (BSC) experienced a “potential exploit” last week, where the BSC ecosystem which has ties to the world’s largest crypto exchange by volume, Binance, suffered a “potential exploit”; as mentioned by the ecosystem people. This incident, according to the on-chain evidence suggested could have incurred a loss of hundreds of millions of dollars in crypto. Following the incident, the BNB Chain was forced to hit the brakes on Thursday, 6 October, 2022.
The BNB Chain is composed of two separate chains, they are – BNB Beacon Chain and BNB Smart Chain (BSC). The official BNB account previously mentioned “Due to irregular activity we’re temporarily pausing BSC,” but later confirmed the activity as a “potential exploit”.
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.
— CZ 🔶 Binance (@cz_binance) October 6, 2022
Following the identification of the problem, the BNB Chain halted its operation and froze $7 million worth of crypto assets. Soon after, BNB Chain announced that it will be holding a series of on-chain governance votes that will help them in deciding whether the hacked funds should be frozen. Not only that, but the ecosystem also said that there will also be a vote happening on a bug bounty reward system program. The aim of that is to prevent similar hacks from happening in the future.
📢BNB Smart Chain (BSC) is running ok from 20+ mins ago.
The validators are confirming their status and the community infrastructure are upgrading as well.
— BNB Chain (@BNBCHAIN) October 7, 2022
Additional Read: BNB Chain Price Slashed after the Hack
BNB Smart Chain Hard Fork
Moving on from the hack encountered by the BSC ecosystem, the blockchain is now going to perform a hard fork in order to fix it. According to the GitHub announcement, this release is set to be a temporary urgent patch to mitigate the cross-chain infrastructure between Beacon Chain and Smart Chain. This step is set up so that the cross-chain can be re-enabled back. This fix will be a hard fork release for both the testnet and the mainnet.
This release referred to as the “temporary urgent patch” will take place at around 08:00 UTC on 12 October 2022.
As stated in the Binance post, the deposits and withdrawals for the BSC network will be suspended an hour before the hard fork is set to happen. The same will be restarted once the upgraded network is deemed to be stable.
Read More on the Binance Announcement
What happened on Binance Smart Chain?
As stated in the BNB Blog post’ “There was an exploit affecting the native cross-chain bridge between BNB Beacon Chain (BEP2) and BNB Smart Chain (BEP20 or BSC), known as “BSC Token Hub.” A total of 2 million BNB was withdrawn. The exploit was through a sophisticated forging of the low-level proof into one common library.”
Source: CoinDesk
Additional Read: Top BNB Ecosystem Tokens
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