SAND Compensation After the Bridge Exploit: How to Get Your Frozen Tokens Back

If you held SAND through the bridge on Base or on BNB Smart Chain, the short answer is this: you are due to get your balance back, one for one, paid out as SAND on Ethereum. According to The Sandbox, the money comes from its own treasury, meaning the company's existing holdings, and no new tokens will be minted for it. Whether you have to do anything yourself hinges on a single question: on the evening of August 21, was your SAND sitting at a centralised exchange or in your own wallet? For most of those affected the answer is "at an exchange", and that majority does not need to file a claim at all. For everyone else, a claim window opens whose start date the operator has given only approximately and whose end is not fixed at all so far. This article sorts out what is documented, what is merely asserted, and which circulating date you are better off ignoring. What happened in the SAND bridge exploit and why is your balance frozen? A bridge is a pair of contracts that makes tokens transferable from one blockchain to another: on the origin chain a holding is locked, on the destination chain an equal amount is issued. The token you then hold on the destination chain is a bridged token and therefore a claim on the locked original, not an asset in its own right. That issuing function is exactly what was attacked on August 21, 2026. Through a configuration flaw in the SAND contracts on Base and BNB Smart Chain, the attacker was able to become the sole validator of incoming bridge messages, according to consistent accounts in the trade press. Whoever holds that role can self-confirm arbitrary transfers and then issue unbacked tokens. The chain notices nothing, because formally everything runs correctly. The timing can be proven to the second The first unauthorised mint falls on Base block 50,283,176 and on block 117,321,965 of BNB Smart Chain. We queried both blocks on September 4, 2026 through public nodes of the respective chain: the Base block carries the timestamp August 21, 2026, 23:41:39 UTC, the block on BNB Smart Chain 23:42:17 UTC the same evening. That leaves 38 seconds between the two chains. The following morning The Sandbox closed the affected contracts. Since then, bridged SAND on Base and BNB Smart Chain can neither be moved nor redeemed. Anyone holding a balance there sees a number in their wallet with nothing actionable behind it for the time being. How that freeze came about, and why trading in this state was not a good idea, we wrote up on August 23 in our report on the SAND bridge exploit; this article picks up where that one ends.