The QANX Bridge deployer wallet was exploited on October 11. The exploit saw the attacker draining 1.4 billion QANX tokens, valued at more than $1 million. The attacker traded these tokens for BNB and ETH before laundering the money through Tornado Cash.
QANX Bridge hacked
QANplatform is a layer one blockchain project. The project has promoted itself as a secure platform because of its use of quantum computing power. However, despite the promise of security, the project has suffered from a bridge exploit that caused the theft of 1.4 billion QANX tokens, valued at more than $1 million.
The Peckshield security company first spotted the attack in question. The initial exploit of the bridge caused a loss of more than 1.4 billion QANX tokens, according to data from Etherscan. The exploit was also followed by other small transactions to the same wallet address, where 28.6 million QANX tokens were stolen, valued at around $20,500.
After Peckshield reached out to the QANplatform, alerting them of the breach, the platform issued its announcement, urging people to avoid conducting transactions using QANX tokens.
The company later posted a follow-up tweet saying all trading, withdrawal, and deposit services for QANX tokens on decentralized exchanges had been halted.
It is reported that after the exploiter withdrew 1.4 billion worth of QANX tokens from the bridge, they swapped the assets for 3090 BNB tokens and 256 Ether tokens. This brings the total amount stolen to around $1.2 million. The attacker later sent the funds to Tornado Cash, a crypto mixer tool that provides transaction anonymity.
Following the attack, the QANX token plunged by over 90%. At the time of writing, QANX was trading at $0.000587, according to data from CoinGecko, after another 20% dip in 24 hours. QANX is now down by 99% from its all-time high level of $0.203, created in November last year.
DeFi bridges continue to suffer exploits
The web 3.0 & crypto sector has been vulnerable to attacks over the past year. However, one of the areas that have been most vulnerable to attacks is cross-chain bridges. Bridges allow users to connect easily with different blockchain networks. While the bridges help to achieve a multi-chain future, they have been a top target for hackers.
Earlier this year, one of the largest hacks in crypto history happened on the Ronin Bridge. The Ronin Bridge was created by the developers of Axie Infinity, Sky Mavis.
On March 23, attackers managed to drain 173,600 ETH and 25.5 million USDC stablecoins from the bridge linking the Sky Mavis Ronin sidechain and the Ethereum blockchain. The exploit led to over $620 million being stolen. The breach was detected around a week after it occurred.
Following the Ronin bridge hack, several crypto firms joined hands to reimburse the victims. The Binance exchange was among the firms that contributed to the reimbursement efforts. The exchange led a $150 million funding round. The funding round attracted other participants, such as Animoca Brands and Andreessen Horowitz’s a16z.
Last week, another hack happened on the cross-chain bridge between the BNB Beacon Chain (BEP2) and BNB Smart Chain (BEP20 or BSC). The hack led to the attackers stealing $100 million worth of cryptocurrencies from the bridge.
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This article was written for Business 2 Community by Ali Raza.
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