Blockchain is running again after a 10-hour break

• The BNB chain team expresses its gratitude to the community for their support during the period the chain was not working.
• A quick response from the community helped minimize losses from the incident.

Earlier today, a hack on the Binance chain resulted in a loss of more than $100 million. However, the situation is now under control as Binance CEO CZ recently tweeted that all funds are safe. The BNB chain team has nevertheless sent out an official statement about the incident.

UPDATE: Official BNB chain response.

We are humbled by the support, hard work and commitment from the community that we are proud to be a part of.

— BNB Chain (@BNBCHAIN) 7 October 2022

In the statement, the team took responsibility for the incident and apologized to the community. The report further said that the team contacted each community validator in turn to stop the spread of the incident. The team highlighted the difficulty of reaching these validators, as many were in different time zones.

According to the report, there were 26 active validators during the incident and a total of 44 across different time zones. Despite the delay in closing, the team managed to minimize losses.

What really happened?

The team also revealed that it would be sharing a timeline of events and details of what happened soon. However, it provided brief information about the incident. There was a hack on the BSC token hub. This hub is the original cross chain between the BNB Smart Chain (BSC or BEP20) and the BNB beacon chain (BEP2). The exploitation resulted in the withdrawal of 2 million BNB tokens.

However, the combined efforts of security experts, validators and projects helped to minimize further loss of funds. The report stated that the next step is to have a chain governance vote. The results of the vote will determine the next steps in the best interests of BNB.

The community will vote on the following:

• whether to freeze the hacked funds.
• whether there should be a reward for those who catch hackers and whether they should receive a maximum of 10 percent of recovered funds.
• whether the remaining hacked funds should be covered with BNB auto-burn.
• the development of a Whitehat program for bugs found in the future; each debugger will receive $1 million for their efforts.

Once the upgrade of the BNB beacon chain is complete, the BNB chain team will turn on the BSC validator voting function for general opinions. Since the beginning of the year, there have been several companies on cross-linked bridges. Therefore, the BNB chain team plans to share detailed lessons learned from this exploit.

It will also suggest more advanced security measures to prevent similar exploits in the future. One such action is to introduce a new on-chain governance mechanism in the BNB chain. The report noted that an increase in the number of community validators is critical to the future success of Web3.

The BNB chain team apologized for the inconvenience caused by suspending the BNB Smart Chain. However, it expressed its acknowledged gratitude to the community for their unwavering support until the incident was over. The exploitation has not caused a major negative impact on BNB’s price. BNB is down 3.91 percent in the last 24 hours and is trading at $282.25 according to fresh data.