Sandbox Bridge Exploit Lets Attacker Mint Billions of Unbacked SAND

Overview

• The Sandbox disclosed Saturday that a malicious actor used compromised bridge permissions to mint unbacked SAND on Base and BNB Smart Chain and that Ethereum and Polygon SAND and user wallets were not breached.
• On‑chain alerts showed enormous minted balances that produced headline valuations as high as about $49 billion, but those figures reflected price times fabricated token counts and did not represent withdrawable reserves.
• Blockchain forensics estimate roughly 14.75 million SAND left the Ethereum adapter before the bridge was cut, with token sales converting to about 79–80 ETH, an economic loss near $675,000.
• Security firms including Blockaid pointed to an abused LayerZero delegate permission via an approveAndCall path as the likely attack vector, and The Sandbox has disabled LayerZero peer links for Base and BNB Smart Chain to isolate the incident.
• Exchanges such as Upbit and Bithumb halted SAND transfers, The Sandbox is taking a pre‑incident snapshot and has pledged to compensate eligible liquidity providers, and a full technical post‑mortem and compensation methodology are pending.