BNB Chain Upgrade Restores Cross-Chain Transfers Following Binance Bridge Hack

BNB Smart Chain successfully deployed an upgraded version of its network, resolving several cross-chain issues following the multi-million dollar bridge hack last week. 

“All relevant funds stuck in cross-chain transfers will now have arrived in your target wallet or source,” said BNB Chain on Wednesday. “Transfers between BNB Beacon Chain and BNB Smart Chain are now functioning normally.”

According to Binance, the upgrade had no effect on the trade of Binance Smart Chain tokens at the exchange but required deposits and withdrawals of those tokens to be temporarily paused. 

The patch release—dubbed the “Moran hard fork”—was described as a “temporary” for re-enabling cross-chain functionality between the BNB Beacon Chain and Binance Smart Chain. 

BNB Beacon Chain launched in April 2019 to support scalable crypto transfers, including tokens like BNB. Binance Smart Chain was introduced the following year to bring smart contracts and decentralized applications (dApps) to the Binance ecosystem. 

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According to BNB Chain’s chief scientist “V” on Twitter, many of the cross-chain transfers between each chain were “queued”, but should now either “arrive in the target wallets or get refunded back to the source.” Any delayed staking rewards accumulated by BNB users are to be dispatched by 0:00:00 UTC on October 13th.

Over the following weeks, developers plan to upgrade the network’s underlying cross-chain proof verification and to introduce other security measures to its cross-chain system. 

Binance bridge hack

On October 6, Binance bridge was drained of over $500 million after forging artificial withdrawal proofs. 

The attacker quickly began dispersing his assets across multiple other blockchains, moving Binance to collaborate with other validators in pausing the entire chain. 

While roughly $110 million appeared to have escaped to networks like Ethereum before the freeze, Binance said its partners helped it reclaim about $7 million in short order.