QANplatform – a quantum-resistant layer 1 blockchain – lost $1 million to a hacker who targeted the network’s blockchain bridge.
Since the attack, its native QANX token has suffered a price collapse of over 90%.
The Latest Bridge Attack
At 05:01 EST on Tuesday, QANplatform tweeted that its smart contract bridge had been hacked and that the attacker had already withdrawn tokens. Etherscan data appears to reinforce this, displaying two bulk withdrawals from the bridge at 08:17 AM and 09:40 AM UTC.
In total, the withdrawals totaled 1.46 billion QANX tokens. These were worth roughly $1 million at the time of the hack and represented almost half of the token’s existing supply of 3.3 billion.
Naturally, such a large portion of the supply being extracted at once has had a demonstrable impact on the coin’s price. The attacker has already sold over 30% of his stolen tokens for ETH using Uniswap, and the token crashed 92.41% on the day. From its all-time high in November, it’s now down 99.82%.
Trading, deposits, and withdrawals for QANX were subsequently paused across centralized exchanges, while the team advised holders not to perform any transactions related to the token.
Hours later, QANPlatform released a video statement explaining that the exploit used to drain the bridge’s funds is a “widely used method affecting multiple chains across the whole blockchain ecosystem.”
“It is not related to QAN’s smart contracts or core technology in any way,” continued the speaker.
On-chain data shows that one of the addresses involved in the attack has been linked to other phishing attacks.
The team has offered the hacker 72 hours to contact the blockchain’s representatives to “avoid facing legal charges.” In previous crypto hack cases, teams have offered to drop charges and let attackers keep a small bounty in return for the vast majority of the stolen funds.
Previous Bridge Hacks
Blockchain bridges are where large amounts of cryptocurrency are stored to support the movement of tokens between blockchains. Naturally, they’re some of the most popular honeypots for hackers to target.
Last week, the Binance bridge was drained of over $500 million, forcing Binance validators to collaborate and temporarily freeze the entire BNB chain. Tens of millions of dollars in tokens still managed to be siphoned off the chain by the hacker.
In March, the largest DeFi hack ever took place against Axie Infinity’s Ronin bridge. After losing $600 million in ETH and USDC, authorities have only managed to recover less than 10% of the funds.
Similarly, Solana’s Wormhole Bridge lost $320 million of ETH to an exploit in February.
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