Hacker Turns Quarter's Worth of Bitcoin into Fake Tokens Valued at $46 Billion
A critical vulnerability in the Symbiosis Bitcoin Bridge on BNB Chain allowed an attacker to mint approximately 46.1 billion syBTC tokens, synthetic assets representing actual Bitcoin deposits, without providing any real backing.
The notional face value of these fake tokens is over $46.1 billion, more than 2,000 times the total circulating supply of Bitcoin.
Instead of dumping billions in fake synthetic Bitcoin, the hacker took a surgical approach and liquidated approximately 4.39 WBTC through Uniswap v4 on Ethereum, walking away with roughly $336,000 in actual proceeds.
The Symbiosis team confirmed the exploit by 04:28 UTC on September 11 and moved quickly to contain the damage, halting all native Bitcoin bridge routes and recovering approximately 15 BTC from a multisig wallet under their control.