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Midnight token is in freefall. NIGHT crashed to an all-time low of $0.01524 after an attacker pulled roughly 515 million tokens out of Wanchain’s Cardano bridge on Thursday, triggering a near-total wipeout of the bridge’s reserves and a brutal sell-off on decentralized exchanges.
The window was tight — almost surgical. The exploit ran from 14:46 to 14:55 UTC, a nine-minute stretch that gutted Wanchain’s Cardano-side lock address. That address is the custody backbone for Wanchain-wrapped NIGHT tokens on the BNB Chain, and by the time the attacker was done, the bridge’s reserves had cratered from 527 million NIGHT tokens down to just 12 million. Other bridged assets on the platform weren’t touched. Just NIGHT, and just enough to do maximum damage.
Not a random smash-and-grab.
How the Attack Played Out
After pulling the tokens, the attacker routed them through a string of newly created wallets. Classic obfuscation playbook. From there, 290 million NIGHT tokens hit Cardano-based decentralized exchanges in what was basically a coordinated dump. The market couldn’t absorb it. NIGHT dropped roughly 27% and was trading around $0.019 before sliding further to that $0.01524 floor — a 97% collapse from earlier levels that’s probably going to take a long time to shake off, if ever.
Wanchain moved fast on one front: the bridge is now suspended. The team shut it down to stop the bleeding and begin investigating. No timeline for when it reopens. No public recovery plan yet. Unclear whether affected users will see any compensation, and the source didn’t specify whether Wanchain has a reserve fund or insurance mechanism in place.
The Midnight Foundation, which sits behind the NIGHT token, was quick to draw a line between the bridge breach and its own infrastructure. Per the Foundation, its protocol, validator network, and consensus mechanisms are all secure and fully operational. The bridge is Wanchain’s infrastructure, not Midnight’s core network — so the Foundation’s framing is technically accurate. But for token holders watching the price chart, that distinction probably doesn’t feel like much comfort right now.
Cross-Chain Bridges Keep Getting Hit
Bridge exploits aren’t new. They’ve been a recurring nightmare across the crypto sector for years, and the Wanchain incident fits a pattern that’s grown frustratingly familiar. Cross-chain bridges are attractive targets precisely because they hold large pools of locked assets — the custody model that makes them work is also what makes them dangerous. An attacker who can find a flaw in how a bridge manages its lock addresses can potentially drain reserves without touching the underlying chains at all.
The Wanchain breach came close on the heels of Allbridge Core’s recent $1.65 million loss, another bridge-layer attack that hit earlier this year. Two incidents in quick succession. The broader question — whether existing security frameworks are anywhere near adequate for the scale of assets now flowing through bridge infrastructure — doesn’t have a clean answer yet.
What’s clear is that the attacker here was sophisticated. The nine-minute execution window, the targeted focus on a single asset while leaving others untouched, the immediate routing through fresh wallets — that’s not someone stumbling onto a bug. That’s someone who mapped the system in advance.
Wanchain’s suspension of the bridge is the right call as a containment measure. But suspension doesn’t recover 515 million tokens, and it doesn’t explain how the lock address was compromised in the first place. The community is waiting on that.
What Investors Are Watching Now
NIGHT’s liquidity picture is messy. With 290 million tokens dumped onto Cardano DEXs in a single session, the market absorbed a shock it wasn’t built for. Even if the price stabilizes, the overhang of the remaining stolen tokens — still sitting somewhere in those newly created wallets — creates real uncertainty. If the attacker moves to sell more, there’s probably not enough buy-side depth to hold the price.
The Midnight Foundation’s statement helps on one narrow front: it keeps the narrative from collapsing entirely into a story about a broken network. Validators are running. Consensus is intact. The protocol didn’t break. That’s worth saying out loud, and the Foundation said it. But the token’s market perception is a separate problem, and reassurances about infrastructure don’t automatically translate into recovered investor confidence.
Wanchain, for its part, hasn’t announced any concrete next steps beyond the bridge suspension. No bug bounty. No on-chain negotiation with the attacker. No public estimate of losses in dollar terms beyond what the token price math implies. The investigation is ongoing, per the team, but the details are thin.
Cross-chain interoperability is one of the harder unsolved problems in crypto infrastructure, and incidents like this one keep resetting the trust baseline. For now, the bridge is down, the tokens are gone, and NIGHT is sitting at $0.01524.
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many Midnight tokens were stolen in the Wanchain bridge hack?
The attacker siphoned approximately 515 million NIGHT tokens from Wanchain’s Cardano-side lock address, draining the bridge’s reserves from 527 million tokens down to just 12 million.
What happened to the Midnight token price after the breach?
NIGHT dropped roughly 27% immediately after the attack, trading around $0.019, before falling further to an all-time low of $0.01524 — a 97% collapse from prior levels.
Did the Midnight Foundation’s network get compromised?
No. The Midnight Foundation said its protocol, validator network, and consensus mechanisms remained secure and fully operational — the breach was limited to Wanchain’s bridge infrastructure.
