Hacker Behind $570,000,000 Exploit Gets Manually Liquidated for $52,300,000 by BNB Chain Protocol

The perpetrator who hacked Binance’s internal cross-chain bridge last year and looted $570 million worth of Binance Coin (BNB) just got some of their stolen funds liquidated.

In October, the hacker in question exploited BSC Token Hub, the cross-chain bridge between the BNB Beacon Chain (BEP2) and the BNB Smart Chain (BSC).

The bad actor subsequently initiated the transfer of about 2 million BNB worth roughly $570 million at the time and deposited 920,000 BNB worth $255.89 into the decentralized finance (DeFi) lending protocol Venus to be used as collateral. 

Amid concerns that the BNB ecosystem would witness a cascading sell-off event if the hacker’s position got liquidated on-chain, the Venus community voted in favor of a governance proposal that enabled the BNB Chain core team to manually liquidate the position. 

Says Venus about the proposal,

“In November 2022, BNB Chain submitted a governance proposal which was passed by the community to whitelist liquidation of the BNB Bridge exploiter’s position exclusively to the BNB Chain core team for the purpose of securing the misappropriated assets and preventing any further impact and sell-off from liquidating.”

On August 18th, the price of BNB dropped to a low of $213.96, prompting the manual liquidation of the attacker’s position to the tune of $52.3 million, according to blockchain security firm PeckShield.

“Following today’s market movement, the BNB Bridge exploiter account was made healthy as promised by BNB Chain using whitelisted liquidation without any resulting shortfall or further impact to BNB.”

At time of writing, BNB is worth $216.69.

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Featured Image: Shutterstock/tunnelmotions/Sensvector