Cardano News Today: Wanchain Bridge Exploit Drains 515M NIGHT

Cardano News Today: Wanchain Bridge Exploit Update and Recovery Plan

Cardano news today centers on a major bridge exploit. Attackers drained roughly 515 million $NIGHT tokens, worth an estimated $9 million to $13 million, from the Wanchain Cardano-BNB bridge treasury. The whole attack took place in about eight minutes.

Source: Official Notice

Cardano News Today: Wanchain Bridge Exploit Details

Wanchain runs a cross-chain infrastructure that moves assets between Cardano and BNB Chain, including bridged NIGHT tokens. NIGHT is the token behind Midnight, a privacy-focused network built as a partner chain to Cardano.

On July 20-21, 2026, someone found a hole in the cross-chain protocol's treasury contract and pulled 515.2 million NIGHT out through several withdrawals.

Key numbers from the attack:

• Amount drained: roughly 515.2 million NIGHT

• Estimated value at the time: $9 million to $13 million

• Attack window: about eight minutes

• Attack transaction: recorded on Cardanoscan

One transfer alone moved about 203 million NIGHT, which the attacker then swapped for roughly 2.8 million ADA on a Cardano decentralized exchange. Wanchain paused the interoperability layer once the activity came to light.

How the TreasuryCheck Validator Bug Let Signatures Repeat on Cardano

Security firm BlockSec Phalcon traced the bug to the cross-chain gateway's TreasuryCheck validator, a Plutus V2 smart contract. The contract built its signed message by joining 14 variable-length fields together with no delimiters or length markers between them.

That gap lets different combinations of field values produce the exact same byte string, and therefore the same hash and signature. Once that happens, an old valid signature can get reused inside a new, forged withdrawal request.

The same contract code did include a SerialiseData builtin, a tool made for exactly this kind of problem. It only ran on the output-datum matching path, though, not on the part that built the signature hash, so it never closed this specific gap.

NIGHT Price Crash: Midnight Foundation's Response

NIGHT tokens price dropped sharply, about 38.5%, once the crypto hack news spread. Data from CoinMarketCap put the decline at 25% for now, while the token hit a record low near $0.01582 today. The price currently at $0.0195, slightly recovered. 

Source: CoinMarketCap Official 

Minswap and other Cardano decentralized exchanges paused NIGHT trading as a precaution. Selling pressure from the drained tokens hitting the open market added to the drop.

Midnight Foundation moved fast to separate itself from the incident. The foundation said the event stayed isolated to the third-party Wanchain bridge and did not touch Midnight's protocol, validator network, or core infrastructure, and it said it remains in close contact with Wanchain during the investigation.

Cross-Chain Bridge Paused as Teams Work Out a Recovery Plan for Users

Wanchain's bridge stayed offline while both teams worked through forensic analysis. As of July 21, 2026, no full recovery plan had come out, though options like treasury replenishment or direct talks with the attacker remain common paths after this type of bridge exploit. 

The latest Cardano news today suggests investigators are also checking whether other bridges carry similar encoding weaknesses.

Where things stand for users right now:

• Platform status: paused pending investigation

• Core Midnight network: unaffected, still running normally

• Users at risk: holders of bridged NIGHT on BNB Chain, plus liquidity providers on the bridge

• Native Midnight stakers: not directly affected, since the core chain stayed secure

This exploit adds to a long list of bridge failures across the industry, and it points to one lesson: cross-chain infrastructure needs the same level of scrutiny as the base chains it connects. 

Wanchain's next update, along with any fix to the TreasuryCheck validator, will show whether bridged NIGHT holders get made whole or whether this becomes another unresolved case in crypto's bridge-security history.

Disclaimer: The Cardano news today is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial or investment advice. Crypto markets carry significant risk. Always do your own research before making any investment decisions.