The cryptoactive ‘exchange’ Binance has suffered a theft of two million units of Binance Coin (BNB), its own cryptocurrency, during a hack on its network. The BNB price is currently around 290 euros, so the stolen funds are worth 580 million euros
The cryptoactive ‘exchange’ Binance has suffered a theft of two million units of Binance Coin (BNB), its own cryptocurrency, during a hack of its block chain network (‘blockchain’), as reported this Friday in a statement .
The BNB price is currently around €290, so the stolen funds are worth approximately €580 million. This is a much higher figure than the 100 million that Binance founder Changpeng Zao had estimated overnight from Thursday to Friday.
Network hacking
The firm has explained that the hacking committed was possible thanks to an ‘exploit’, an attack that takes advantage of a vulnerability, in the system that serves as a bridge between the BNB Beacon Chain and BNB Smart Chain networks.
The problem could be solved thanks to the fact that Binance was able to completely stop the transactions of its blockchain network, thanks to the ‘exchange’ directly contacting the 44 people who act as “validators” of the chain.
Minimize losses
“Decentralized chains are not designed to be stopped, but by contacting community validators one by one we were able to stop the incident… This delayed the shutdown, but we were able to minimize losses,” Binance said.
The firm plans to design a new governance mechanism to prevent possible new attacks in the future. Also, despite this theft, Binance plans to continue increasing the number of validators to achieve “greater decentralization”, as they consider it an “essential” step.