Key takeaways:
- Following last week’s $100 million hack, BNB Chain has undergone the Moran hard fork
- The upgrade patches vulnerability in the BSC Token Hub, which was used by the attacker
- In related news, the 21st BNB burn took place today, forever removing $574 million worth of BNB from circulation
“Moran” hard fork goes live following a $100 million hack last week
On October 6, BNB Chain suffered a massive exploit that impacted more than $560 million worth of digital assets, or roughly 2,000,000 BNB. To prevent any further damage, Binance Smart Chain (BSC) validators momentarily halted the operation of the blockchain. The chain was restarted a few hours later with several hotfixes implemented.
Yesterday, BNB Chain developers executed the Moran hard fork to establish a more permanent solution and eliminate vulnerabilities in the cross-chain bridge connecting BSC and BNB Beacon Chain, which was used as an attack point in last week’s hack.
It is worth noting the attacker managed to move roughly $100 million worth of digital assets off-chain, while the renaming funds were frozen before they could be transferred off of BNB Chain. According to devs, the attacker used an exploit in the BSC Token Hub to generate new tokens, rather than stealing existing ones.
The 21st quarterly burn removes $574 million worth of BNB from circulation
In related BNB Chain news, the 21st quarterly token burn was completed earlier today, which forever destroyed 2,065,152 BNB (worth roughly $574 million). Binance shared the news via a Twitter post.
Binance’s scheduled BNB burns, which have recently been revamped to use the automatic Auto-Burn formula, are meant to remove 100,000,000 BNB, or half of the total supply, from circulation. The token burning makes BNB deflationary, which is one of the mechanisms used to maintain its value and provide long-term price stability.
According to BNBBurn.info, nearly 39,000,000 BNB has been burned to date. The amount of burned tokens is determined by the number of blocks that have been generated on BSC during any given quarter.
The last quarterly burn of 2022 was significantly bigger than the previous one, both in terms of tokens destroyed and the dollar amount – for context, the 20th token burn saw 1,959,595 BNB (roughly $447M at then-market rates) being sent to a dead wallet address.
