Blockchain is running again after 10 hours pause

• The BNB chain team expresses its appreciation to its community for their support during the period the chain wasn’t working.
• A quick response from the community helped minimize losses from the incident.

Earlier today, a hack on the Binance chain resulted in a loss of more than $100 million. However, the situation is now under control as Binance CEO, CZ, recently tweeted that all funds are safe. Nevertheless, the BNB chain team has issued an official statement regarding the incident.

UPDATE: Official BNB Chain Response.

We’re humbled by the support, hard work, and dedication from the community of which we are proud to be a part.https://t.co/r0TcZYxFzJ

— BNB Chain (@BNBCHAIN) October 7, 2022

In the statement, the team took responsibility for the incident and apologized to the community. The report further said the team contacted each community validator one after the other to stop the spread of the incident. The team highlighted the difficulty in reaching out to these validators, as many were in different time zones.

According to the report, there were 26 active validators during the incident and 44 in total across various time zones. Despite the delay in the closure, the team successfully minimized losses.

What happened exactly?

The team also revealed that it would share a timeline of events and details about what happened soon. However, it gave brief information regarding the incident. There was a hack on the BSC token hub. This hub is the native cross-chain between the BNB Smart Chain (BSC or BEP20) and the BNB beacon chain (BEP2). The exploit resulted in the withdrawal of 2 million BNB tokens.

However, the combined efforts of security experts, validators, and projects helped to minimize additional loss of funds. The report stated that the next step is to have an on-chain governance vote. The results from the poll will determine the next action steps for the good of BNB.

The community will vote on the following:

• whether to freeze the hacked funds.
• whether there should be a bounty for those that catch hackers and whether they should receive a maximum of 10 percent of recovered funds.
• whether to cover the remaining hacked funds with BNB auto-burn.
• the development of a Whitehat program for bugs found in the future; each bug finder will receive $1 million for their efforts.

Once the BNB beacon chain upgrade is complete, the BNB chain team will switch on the BSC validator voting function for general opinions. Since the beginning of the year, there have been several exploits on cross-chain bridges. Hence, the BNB chain team plans to share detailed lessons from this exploit.

Also, it would suggest more advanced security measures to prevent similar exploits in the future. One such action is introducing a new on-chain governance mechanism on the BNB chain. The report noted that an increase in the number of community validators is crucial to the future success of Web3.

The BNB chain team apologized for the inconvenience it caused by suspending the BNB Smart Chain. However, it expressed its renowned appreciation to the community for their unwavering support till the incident was over. The exploit hasn’t caused a huge negative impact on BNB’s price. BNB is down 3.91 percent in the last 24 hours and trades at $282.25 according to recent data.