BNB Chain to Conduct Governance Votes on What to Do With the Stolen Funds

After losing millions of dollars worth of assets in a cross-chain hack, the team behind BNB Chain – formerly Binance Smart Chain (BSC) – plans to conduct on-chain governance votes to determine what to do with the stolen funds. 

Recall that BNB Chain temporarily halted all network operations after an attacker exploited a vulnerability on the BSC Token Hub cross-chain bridge to siphon two million BNB valued at $600 million.

BNB Chain Hacker Absconds With $100M 

The hacker still had about $400 worth of assets on the network before the suspension, which made it impossible for them to transfer the funds to other chains. 

According to reports, the attacker was able to exit with around $70 million to $80 million across several networks. However, cyber security firm Hackenclub said the perpetrator made away with $110 million through Fantom, Ethereum, and Polygon. 

Shortly after resuming network operations, the BSC team announced plans to hold governance votes on four critical decisions relating to the hack, including bounties for future attacks.  

The Way Forward

In the coming days, an upgrade on the BNB Beacon Chain (BEP2) will allow the network validators to vote on what will be done with the stolen funds, whether they will be frozen or not, or “auto-burn” them. 

The validators will vote on the launch of a white hat program that will reward hackers with $1 million for discovering a “significant bug.” 

The on-chain vote will also decide the possibility of a bounty reward of “up to 10% of the recovered funds” to anyone who helps to catch an attacker.

The team intends to introduce a new on-chain governance mechanism to combat and defend the chain from future attacks.

“Looking at the broader picture, we have seen a series of attacks on targeting vulnerabilities in cross-chain bridges. We will openly share the details of the postmortem and all lessons on how to implement more advanced security measures to shore-up these vulnerabilities,” the team said. 

Furthermore, the network seeks to increase the number of validators to further decentralize the protocol.