BNB chain halted after suspected hack, $536 million compromised
Important takeaways
- A $536 million BNB whale started acting erratically today.
- The wallet began exchanging and lending tokens across multiple ecosystems at a rapid pace, leading onlookers to believe it had been hacked.
- BNB Chain halted its blockchain due to “irregular activity”.
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The BNB Chain has been halted after one of the largest BNB holders started showing erratic behavior on the chain, suggesting a hack.
BNB Whale Compromised
A BNB whale appears to have been hacked.
On-chain data suggests a major holder of BNB was hacked. Around 17:30 UTC the wallet began extracting significant amounts of coins it had staked from various blockchain ecosystems. It then started exchanging and borrowing tokens from a number of different protocols in a very fast fashion. At the time of writing, the wallet controls over $536,930,715 in various assets.
The erratic nature of the wallet’s chain activity suggests it may have been compromised. Stablecoin issuer Tether already has too stepped on in to blacklist the address, preventing it from sending USDT to new wallets.
At the time of writing, the wallet held 1,020,094,7687 BNB (approximately $287,870,744), 33,772 in ETH and wETH (approximately $45,696,989), and approximately $63 million in stablecoins including USDT, BUSD, USDC, and fUSDT. The wallet also has over $127.7 million in assets locked across the Venus, Geist and Trader Joe’s lending protocols.
The BNB chain’s official Twitter account indicated the chain would be stopped due to “irregular activity.”
This is a development story.
Disclaimer: At the time of writing, the author of this piece owned BTC, ETH and several other cryptocurrencies.
