After more than 500 million US dollars were stolen, the public chain was suspended and resumed, and BNB Chain encountered centralization doubts again

This morning, the official bridge of BNB Chain was hacked. According to an independent analyst of the social media account CIA Officer, the attack currently includes 1.04 million BNB, venusBNB worth $389 million, and $28 million BUSD, totaling $718 million. After the theft, another "largest chain attack in history".

As soon as the news was made public, the price of BNB dropped by 5%. At 6 a.m. this morning, BNB Chain officials conveniently announced the suspension of operations to investigate potential vulnerabilities. According to the team, only $70 million to $80 million in stolen assets were transferred to other public chains or off-chain, and the remaining more than $400 million in BNB in the attacker's wallet has been frozen.

One hour later, Binance founder CZ posted on social media that the attacker exploited the vulnerability of the cross-chain bridge BSC Token Hub to generate additional BNB (Note by BlockBeats, BSC Token Hub It is a cross-chain bridge between the BNB beacon chain and the BNB chain). Binance has asked all validators to suspend the BSC network. User funds are safe. We apologize for the inconvenience caused to our users, and Binance will provide further updates accordingly.

Many developers in the community believe that this attack may be related to the underlying code design of Cosmos Related, theoretically other chains using the Cosmos SDK have similar risks (BlockBeats note, this claim has not been officially confirmed).

According to PeckShieldAlert, a PeckShieldAlert social media account, BNB Chain attackers have transferred about $89.5 million in attack funds to other chains (non-BNB Chain), of which about 58% were transferred to Ethereum, and about 33% were transferred to to Fantom, about 4.5% transferred to Arbitrum.

According to SlowMist, it has been monitored that the hacker address of the BNB Chain theft has interacted with multiple dApps in different public chain ecosystems, including Multichain and Venus Protocol , Stargate, Curve, Uniswap, Trader Joe, PancakeSwap, SushiSwap, etc., in which the attacker deposited the stolen BNB into the BSC lending agreement Venus and lent 150 million stable coins.

As of 8 o'clock this morning, hackers have transferred about $53 million in assets to Ethereum, Transfer of nearly $49 million in assets to Fantom. In addition, the relevant address transferred to the Avalanche chain (1,729,320 USDT) by hackers may have been blacklisted, but the address transferred to Arbitrum (2,000,000 USDT) has not been listed yet. It is worth noting that before BNB Chain officially responded to the attack, the attacker’s address had been blacklisted by Tether, the issuer of USDT.

At 9 o'clock this morning, BNB Chain officially posted on social media that it has asked BNB Chain node validators to contact them in the next few hours so that they can plan for node upgrades. In this regard, Binance founder CZ said: "It is temporarily impossible to give a specific estimated time for the upgrade. Binance gives developers time to fully understand the root cause of this incident, implement fixes and conduct in-depth testing before proceeding."

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At 1 p.m., BNB Chain released the BSC v1.1.15 version update. The official social media stated that BSC validators are coordinating to seek to restore the operation of the BNB Chain network within 1 hour. The new version aims to block activity from hacker addresses, and the cross-chain bridge between the BNB Beacon Chain and the BNB Smart Chain will be temporarily disabled. The official request for all node operators to try to upgrade to the above version. Validators and the community will upgrade further to fully address this issue.

At about 2:50 pm, according to official news, BNB Chain has resumed block production, network verifiers are confirming their status, and the community infrastructure is currently being upgraded.

At about 3:20 p.m., Binance officially posted on social media that BNB Chian has resumed operation, and the BNB Chain deposit and withdrawal service on the Binance platform has resumed.

From the occurrence of the theft, to the suspension of node operation, to the resumption of block production, the BNB Chain official team only took 9 hours. The BNB Chain official's rapid response to the hacker attack this time, although it controlled a large amount of stolen funds in time, once again aroused the community's doubts about the centralization of BNB Chain.

In late September, Binance was criticized by the community due to the issue of LUNC burning fees. Condemned, the term "#BoycottBinance" once became a trending search on Twitter. This theft, and BNB Chain’s official response, once again put the team under the spotlight of the anti-centralization narrative. Some developers pointed out that the future focus of this event will be how BNB Chain resolves the 2 million BNB Tokens that have been minted.

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