DeFi on Binance Smart Chain is yet to see the last on the tagged “well-organized” attack on their networks. Past victims of such attacks include Chainswap, Pancake Bunny, and BurgerSwap. Joining the list of hacked DeFi networks is pNetwork, resulting in a total loss of $12.7 million worth of BTC (277 Bitcoin).
pNetwork is a multi-chain bridging protocol aimed towards creating ease for crypto investors on the mobility of crypto assets, including Bitcoin and Ethereum among several chains. The pNetwork project has helped expand the liquidity of several decentralized finance ecosystems of multiple chains. The pNetwork ecosystem has grown due to the transparency it provides, allowing anyone in the environment to become a validator and monitor how collateral is managed and transactions are processed on the network.
Unfortunately, the network announced that one of its bridges, Binance Smart Chain, has been compromised due to a bug in its codebase which resulted in the hacker carting away with 277 Bitcoin. However, no other bridges or networks on the ecosystem were affected by the hack. The pNetwork protocol teams have identified the bug and have worked on means to fix placing all bridges on hold for the time being for a full scan to prevent similar events in the future.
About the siphoned Bitcoin, pNetwork has proposed the attackers, offering them a bounty in exchange for the funds. The bounty proposed is a sum of $1, 500, 000 in exchange for the 277 Bitcoin. This method was chosen because it has proven effective in the past with the Polynetwork hack and Miso on the Sushi Protocol. However, the past cases had information on the identity of the black hat hacker which sped the return of the funds.
The pNetwork protocol team is working on recovering the lost funds and also getting back the ecosystem bridges to full function. We wait to see if the proposed approach will work in this case and also if there will be ways to eliminate or limit the hacks on DeFi environments.