Wanchain Cardano Bridge Exploited, $10M NIGHT Stolen

Wanchain’s Cardano-to-BNB Chain bridge suffered a major exploit that drained about 515.2 million NIGHT tokens from the Cardano-side treasury, triggering a large market sell-off that pushed NIGHT down by roughly 30% to 40% in short order. Initial analysis from BlockSec points to a possible flaw in the TreasuryCheck validator’s message signing, where 14 fields were concatenated without clear separators, enabling potential signature reuse and data reassembly to authorize different transactions. Investigations show the attacker moved the stolen NIGHT to a primary wallet on Cardano and then liquidated a substantial portion through DEXs and DeFi protocols; the Midnight Foundation emphasized the core Midnight network itself remained secure and that the breach involved third-party bridge infrastructure. The incident involved four separate transfers totaling the 515.2 million NIGHT within about eight minutes, with on-chain observers noting that the tokens were specifically targeted while other assets on the bridge were not withdrawn. Night’s price collapse prompted ongoing scrutiny of cross-chain bridges and the need for more robust encoding and signing practices to prevent similar attacks. Authorities and security researchers are continuing the investigation to determine full scope and to implement mitigations.