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Wanchain Bridge Exploit Drains 515 Million NIGHT and Sends Token Down Over 30%

Preliminary analysis suggests a message-encoding flaw in the bridge’s validator that may have allowed signature reuse and triggered large token sales.

Overview

  • On July 20 the Wanchain Cardano–BNB bridge moved about 515.2 million NIGHT out of a bridge treasury in four transfers and a single wallet sold roughly 300 million NIGHT on decentralized exchanges.
  • Blockchain security firm BlockSec said its early review points to a non-injective signed-message encoding in the bridge’s TreasuryCheck validator that could let a valid signature be reused because fields were concatenated without clear separators.
  • The Midnight Foundation said the Midnight core network, its validators and consensus were not compromised and that the incident was limited to Wanchain’s bridge custody and validation logic.
  • The large on-chain transfers and subsequent sales pushed NIGHT down more than 30%, with intraday lows near $0.015 to $0.018 and trading volume spiking as holders exited positions.
  • Investigations are ongoing, Wanchain has not published a full technical postmortem, and on-chain tracing plus a detailed disclosure from Wanchain will be needed to confirm the root cause and the fate of remaining tokens.