Cardano News Today: Wanchain Bridge Exploit Drains 515M NIGHT

Cardano News Today: Wanchain Bridge Exploit Update and Recovery Plan Cardano news today centers on a major bridge exploit. Attackers drained roughly 515 million $NIGHT tokens, worth an estimated $9 million to $13 million, from the Wanchain Cardano-BNB bridge treasury. The whole attack took place in about eight minutes. Source: Official Notice Cardano News Today: Wanchain Bridge Exploit Details Wanchain runs a cross-chain infrastructure that moves assets between Cardano and BNB Chain, including bridged NIGHT tokens. NIGHT is the token behind Midnight, a privacy-focused network built as a partner chain to Cardano. On July 20-21, 2026, someone found a hole in the cross-chain protocol's treasury contract and pulled 515.2 million NIGHT out through several withdrawals. Key numbers from the attack: Amount drained: roughly 515.2 million NIGHT Estimated value at the time: $9 million to $13 million Attack window: about eight minutes Attack transaction: recorded on Cardanoscan One transfer alone moved about 203 million NIGHT, which the attacker then swapped for roughly 2.8 million ADA on a Cardano decentralized exchange. Wanchain paused the interoperability layer once the activity came to light. How the TreasuryCheck Validator Bug Let Signatures Repeat on Cardano Security firm BlockSec Phalcon traced the bug to the cross-chain gateway's TreasuryCheck validator, a Plutus V2 smart contract. The contract built its signed message by joining 14 variable-length fields together with no delimiters or length markers between them. That gap lets different combinations of field values produce the exact same byte string, and therefore the same hash and signature. Once that happens, an old valid signature can get reused inside a new, forged withdrawal request. The same contract code did include a SerialiseData builtin, a tool made for exactly this kind of problem. It only ran on the output-datum matching path, though, not on the part that built the signature hash, so it never closed this specific gap. NIGHT Price Crash: Midnight Foundation's Response NIGHT tokens price dropped sharply, about 38.5%, once the crypto hack news spread. Data from CoinMarketCap put the decline at 25% for now, while the token hit a record low near $0.01582 today. The price currently at $0.0195, slightly recovered. Source: CoinMarketCap Official Minswap and other Cardano decentralized exchanges paused NIGHT trading as a precaution. Selling pressure from the drained tokens hitting the open market added to the drop. Midnight Foundation moved fast to separate itself from the incident. The foundation said the event stayed isolated to the third-party Wanchain bridge and did not touch Midnight's protocol, validator network, or core infrastructure, and it said it remains in close contact with Wanchain during the investigation. Cross-Chain Bridge Paused as Teams Work Out a Recovery Plan for Users Wanchain's bridge stayed offline while both teams worked through forensic analysis.