Binance got hacked for $110M (but it was almost $586M)
Tell us if you ever ran this scheme as a kid:
You go to your mom and ask for your weeks worth of pocket money.
You go to your dad and ask for the same weeks worth of pocket money.
You quietly hope they don't mention the exchanges to one another.
You crack open a ten pack of Capri Sun, and start living large.
Last Friday, a hacker figured out how to run the same scheme on Binance - by requesting $293M worth of BNB tokens, then convincing the system to send them twice that - for a total of $586M.
The hack took place on a 'cross-chain bridge,' which is something that allows you to send cryptocurrency between different blockchains (for example, from Ethereum to Solana).
(Or to put that into a Web2 context, a cross-chain bridge is similar to a program like VirtualBox, which lets you run Mac apps, on Windows).
The good news is - Binance caught the exploit before and temporarily halted all transactions on the blockchain before it could be completed.
The great news is - the hack created BNB tokens out of thin air, instead of lifting them from existing accounts (so no customer funds were touched).
The bad news is - the hacker still made off with ~$110M worth of BNB tokens.
...so what next?
Binance have worked with the team behind the Tether stablecoin (USDT), to freeze ~$7M worth of the $110M that the hackers managed to lift, and will run a community vote to decide whether these frozen funds should be destroyed or not.
So the hackers might not want to crack a whole ten pack of Capris Suns just yet...
That being said, $103M isn't anything to sneeze at.
