$718 million stolen from BNB Chain. Is decentralization a false proposition?
In the past week, hackers have been rampant in the encryption world, and there have been major incidents of being stolen and hacked in every three days.
On October 7, the BNB chain was hacked. The attacker stole 2 million BNB from Binance Bridge, about $566 million, and a large amount of venusBNB and BUSD, with a total of $718 million.
This amount is the largest on-chain attack in history.
The BNB Chain attackers transferred about $89.5 million in funds from the attack to other chains, of which about 58% were transferred to Ethereum, about 33% to Fantom, and about 4.5% to Arbitrum.
The addresses transferred to the Avalanche chain (1,729,320 USDT) may have been blacklisted, but the addresses transferred to Arbitrum (2,000,000 USDT) have not been blacklisted for the time being.
At present, the service on the BNB chain has been suspended, and operations on the chain are no longer possible. More than 600 million US dollars are still on the BNB chain. I don’t know what the official will do. Some people say that the transaction may be rolled back, and some people say that it may be destroyed, but the specific solution is waiting for further official announcement.
The BNB Chain was attacked, allowing users to re-discuss the issues of centralization and decentralization.
The centralized platform was attacked by hackers, and all nodes were stopped, so that the assets stolen by the hackers could not be circulated and realized, which relatively guaranteed the security of assets. Even if the hacker issues an additional 2 million BNB through a loophole attack, he will not be able to escape completely, and the stolen assets will not be withdrawn.
In a decentralized platform, if a hacker finds a system loophole, it becomes easy to steal the assets on the chain. Through the mixer, it is no longer possible to track the whereabouts of the stolen assets.
For example, the Qubit Finance project on the BNB chain was hacked last year, and 206,809 BNBs were stolen, with a total of more than 80 million US dollars.
The hacker crossed the chain through #BNB and #BUSD, during which the stolen user begged the BNB chain to freeze the hacker address, but only received a reply that BNBChain is decentralized and cannot help.
As a result, the stolen users watched their funds being transferred out across the chain, and the hacker waited 2 days to receive the stolen cross-chain assets.
While the Qubit project was attacked by hackers and failed to recover, the project also stagnated.
Decentralization means knowing that it is a hacker, but not intervening to prevent it. But today Binance Bridge was hacked, BNB Chain was stopped within minutes, and decentralization became a false proposition.
However, it was also centralized processing that prevented the hacking from affecting the entire crypto market on a large scale, and BNB did not plummet.
It seems that the safety of users’ funds is relatively guaranteed, but at the same time, the BNB network is suspended, and the assets stored by ordinary players on the chain cannot be transferred or traded, and the wallet is no longer their own.
You saved the mnemonic, but sorry, the chain is not working for now!
On October 2, the Transit flash exchange platform recommended by the Tokenpocket wallet was also attacked by hackers. The hackers stole the wallet assets interacted with Transit, and the stolen funds accumulated more than 18 million US dollars.
Through many back-and-forth communications between the project party and the hacker, the hacker stated that 70% of the assets were returned and 10,000 BNB was reserved as a bounty reward for discovering project vulnerabilities. At present, the Transit team has started the work of returning the stolen assets. The users who have been stolen this time can claim the stolen assets according to the official announcement.
Some users commented that the hackers were able to return most of the assets this time, but they were willing to cooperate because the security team locked the IP, mailbox and equipment and other information.
The combination of decentralized and centralized platforms has contributed to the result that hackers return most of their assets, so that the assets of stolen users can be recovered.
As a retail player in the crypto market, Chuxiao Chain really does not pay much attention to the proposition of centralization and decentralization, and is more concerned about asset security and profit opportunities.
However, every player is in the entire market and cannot be alone. Decentralized hackers are everywhere, and the disadvantages of centralization often occur around. The encrypted market should be played and cherished. Always pay attention to the security of wallets and platforms.
The above is just my personal opinion and summary, no investment advice, any investment behavior of readers has nothing to do with the author.
I’m Chuxiaolian, I’m learning about blockchain, paying attention to metaverse and NFT and web3.
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