$12.4M Lost as DeFi Platform pNetwork Suffers Exploit

Published on: 20.09.2021

pNetwork is the latest cross-chain interoperability project to suffer a multi-million dollar attack.

The DeFi project announced that $12.4 million worth of wrapped Bitcoin had been stolen from its bridge contract late Sunday. The contract lives on Binance Smart Chain.

pNetwork enables the cross-chain transfer of Bitcoin and other assets across other Layer 1 blockchains such as Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain through pegged tokens (pTokens). Anyone can use pNetwork to lock their Bitcoin as collateral in the specific bridge contract and mint tokenized Bitcoin, also known as pBTC.

Due to a security vulnerability in the bridge connecting Bitcoin and Binance Smart Chain, the unknown hacker was able to extract the majority of the deposited Bitcoin.

The team has not yet disclosed precise details, it said it had fixed the bug, adding that a post-mortem report would follow. It also offered the hacker a $1.5 million bounty for the safe return of the funds, and said that the bridges would run with “extra security measures in place for the first few days.”

pBTC is one of many tokenized Bitcoin projects that allow the top crypto asset to be used in DeFi applications across multiple chains.

Cross-chain interoperability for assets like Bitcoin is regarded as one of crypto’s top problems to solve, but so far, few foolproof solutions have emerged.

The pNetwork is only the latest in a list of several cross-chain project exploits.

pNetwork’s governance token PNT has also been hit hard by the incident, currently trading about 20% in the red at $0.91.

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