Altcoins News

Story: Wanchain’s Cardano Bridge Hack Drains 515 Million NIGHT Tokens in Nine Minutes

By Dan Saada

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How the Attack Played Out. After pulling the tokens, the attacker routed them through a string of newly created wallets.

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Cross-Chain Bridges Keep Getting Hit. Bridge exploits aren't new. They've been a recurring nightmare across the crypto sector for years,…

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What Investors Are Watching Now. NIGHT's liquidity picture is messy. With 290 million tokens dumped onto Cardano DEXs in a single…

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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,…

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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.

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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.

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The Midnight Foundation, which sits behind the NIGHT token, was quick to draw a line between the bridge breach and its own infrastructure.

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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.

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More context: Cardano Cuts Smart Contract Costs With Van Rossem Fork Before Leios Launch

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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.

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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…

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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…

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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.

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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.

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More context: Tokenized Asset Market Crosses $2.3 Billion as Utility Beats Speculation

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