NIGHT, the native token of the Midnight ecosystem, fell about 45% on Monday after an exploit on Wanchain’s Cardano-to-BNB Chain bridge allowed an attacker to mint and sell a massive amount of tokens. The incident was described as a third-party bridge failure rather than a breach of Cardano or Midnight themselves, but it still wiped out an estimated $9 million to $13 million from the Cardano-side bridge treasury and sent the token sharply lower.
Bridge flaw and token drain
According to the report, the attacker exploited a weakness in Wanchain’s TreasuryCheck validator. The validator encoded 14 fields without separators, creating conditions for a signature-reuse attack. That flaw allegedly allowed a legitimate transfer approval for roughly 3,110 NIGHT to be expanded into more than 203 million NIGHT in a single transaction.
The newly created tokens were then sold on Cardano-based decentralized exchanges. The dumping pressure pushed NIGHT down rapidly and drained what the report estimated at roughly $10 million from the treasury, with the broader range put between $9 million and $13 million depending on the token price used in the calculation.
Hoskinson blames legacy bridge design
Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson said the episode underscored the risks of older bridge infrastructure. He characterized the hack as a problem rooted in a legacy, third-party architecture built by Wanchain, not in the underlying security of Cardano or Midnight. In his view, the event showed why the industry needs to move away from cross-chain systems that depend heavily on smart contracts or multi-signature arrangements that can become points of failure.
Hoskinson also linked the incident to a broader rise in AI-assisted exploitation, arguing that rapidly advancing attack methods are exposing weaknesses across many sectors, not only in Web3. He described the exploit as a localized stress event and said Cardano and Midnight remained secure throughout.
Response and partial recovery
The price shock did not last uninterrupted. Less than 24 hours after the selloff, NIGHT rebounded from a local low of $0.015 to $0.026. The recovery came after Cardano-linked entities including IOG, Midnight, and Intersect set up a centralized “War Room” to coordinate the response.
That group worked with exchanges including Binance, Kraken, and OKX in an effort to freeze attacker wallets and stop malicious deposits, according to the report. The coordination was aimed at limiting further sales pressure and containing the fallout from the exploit.
Even so, the rebound proved fragile. Bearish pressure reportedly returned by Wednesday morning, leaving NIGHT trading at $0.021 at the time of writing in the source article.
Wider implications
Beyond the immediate price move, the exploit has renewed scrutiny of bridge security and the dependence of cross-chain systems on designs that can fail outside the core blockchain they connect to. Hoskinson criticized coverage that focused only on the initial collapse in NIGHT and omitted the subsequent recovery, but the incident nonetheless highlighted how a vulnerability in external infrastructure can quickly spill over into token markets.
Source: Coin Edition