Wanchain bridge breach drains 515 million NIGHT tokens

A major security breach on a cross-chain bridge operated by Wanchain has resulted in the loss of approximately 515 million NIGHT tokens, worth roughly $9 million at the time of the incident, and triggered a sharp sell-off in the affected cryptocurrency. The exploit targeted the Wanchain bridge connecting the Cardano and BNB Chain networks, draining the tokens from the bridge's treasury on or around July 20, 2026.

Blockchain security firm BlockSec reported the attack, with its initial investigation pointing to a potential flaw in the bridge's "TreasuryCheck" validator. The firm suggested a "non-injective signed-message encoding" problem may have allowed for signature reuse. According to BlockSec's analysis, the validator combined 14 variable-length data fields without proper separators, which could enable different transaction data to produce the same message hash. This design flaw might have allowed an attacker to reuse a valid signature to authorize an unauthorized transaction. BlockSec emphasized its findings are preliminary, and a full technical post-mortem from Wanchain was pending.

The Midnight Foundation, the organization behind the privacy-focused Midnight blockchain for...