Cardano Bridge Hack Exposes Ongoing Crypto Security Risks

A recent security incident involving Wanchain's Cardano-BNB bridge has led to the theft of approximately $9-10 million in NIGHT tokens. According to an official report from Wanchain, a contract logic error allowed an attacker to drain funds from the cross-chain bridge treasury on July 20.

The exploit was caused by an ambiguity in contract serialization validation on the ADA blockchain side. The attacker manipulated byte boundaries in concatenated fields that lacked length prefixes or delimiters, reinterpreting a legitimate small signature as authorization for a massive payout.

Wanchain is actively working with exchanges to track and freeze the stolen assets. However, the cross-chain bridge remains offline, with no concrete timeline announced for restoring wrapped asset reserves. A targeted smart contract fix is expected within a week, subject to formal security audits.

The incident highlights the importance of native security frameworks in the crypto industry. Charles Hoskinson pointed out that similar bridge vulnerabilities have hit other third-party bridges recently, underlining ongoing hack risks when connecting distinct blockchains.