BounceBit Shuts Down Blockchain After $3.1 Million Token Heist

BounceBit, a blockchain-based platform for Bitcoin restaking and CeDeFi products, has permanently shut down its Layer 1 chain after an attacker exploited an authorization flaw to drain nearly a quarter of the token's circulating supply.

The attack occurred on August 20, when an unauthorized user stole approximately $3.1 million worth of BB tokens from nine wallets. The stolen funds equal roughly 23% of the total circulating supply of BB tokens.

BounceBit claims that no private keys were compromised and no signatures or exchange accounts were hacked. Instead, the attack exploited a critical vulnerability in Evmos, the Cosmos-based framework on which BounceBit Chain was built. This flaw was publicly disclosed by Evmos's developers in July 2024 and fixed in a subsequent major release.

The platform has decided not to rebuild its network, citing the difficulty of reworking a codebase that Evmos itself has discontinued. Instead, BB tokens will be reissued as a BEP-20 asset on BNB Chain from a pre-attack snapshot, with balances automatically migrating to matching addresses.