SAND Price Surges as Hackers Mint Nearly $49 Billion in Tokens

The Sandbox (SAND) project suffered a significant security breach on August 22, 2026, when hackers exploited the SAND cross-chain OFT contract on the Base blockchain.

The attack allowed attackers to mint tokens infinitely without any collateral, resulting in nearly $49 billion worth of SAND being created across over 400 transactions.

The hacker compromised LayerZero permissions related to SAND's OFT on the Base blockchain using the 'approveAndCall' function, circumventing usual checks and creating new SAND without backing.

At one point, 500 million SAND had already been minted, amounting to nearly 17% of the token's total 3 billion supply.

The impact on the SAND market was significant, with the price surging by 4.76% and trading volume increasing by over 400%, despite the project stating that user wallets were not compromised and the effect was below 0.01% of the entire SAND supply.