515M NIGHT bridge exploit rocks Cardano but ADA jumps 8% anyway after landmark hard fork
A Wanchain bridge tied to Cardano was exploited on July 20, draining about 515 million NIGHT tokens from a Cardano lock address backing NIGHT on BNB Chain. NIGHT plunged over 30% to a record low near $0.015, with the stolen funds valued around $9 million–$10 million. Wanchain suspended the bridge and began investigating. BlockSec said a possible signed-message encoding flaw in TreasuryCheck may have allowed signature reuse, but this was preliminary. Midnight said the breach hit third-party bridge infrastructure only; Cardano’s protocol, consensus, validators, and NIGHT smart contract were unaffected. Major exchanges helped restrict attacker-linked funds. Charles Hoskinson called bridges the weakest part of crypto security and said additional layers like zero-knowledge proofs, trusted execution environments, multisigs, and identity tools may reduce future risk. Despite the incident, ADA rose nearly 8% to around $0.175, helped by the broader crypto rebound and recent network upgrades.
