Binance has successfully completed the execution of its hard fork on the BNB smart chain to fix the loopholes after the $100 million exploit.
The cryptocurrency market has become a target zone for executing exploits and hacks. On 6 October, Binance’s BNB smart chain witnessed an exploit, erasing $100 million worth of crypto from the platform. The main reason behind launching this hard fork is to secure and fix the infrastructure of the Binance smart chain after this significant hack last week.
BNB’s Hard Fork Moran To Mitigate The Cross-Chain Infrastructure
BNB Chain has completed its hard fork upgrade called Moran in order to secure and recover the chain following an exploit of $100 million last week. According to officials, the upgrade of the BNB Chain with the release of the mainnet and testnet of the hard fork is a “temporary urgent patch to mitigate the cross-chain infrastructure between Beacon chain and Smart chain.”
The hard fork is a blockchain upgrade that aims to bring a significant change to the network’s software, eliminating the older version. It is a permanent divergence from the hacked blockchain to a new one, leading to a separation of the chain. The hard fork upgrade of the BNB chain was executed successfully at 4 a.m. ET today at a block height of 22,107,423. The upgrade was mainly focused on implementing a software patch that migrated a critical loophole to ICS23, which was in the iavl hash check, and introduced a block header in sequence checks. These vulnerabilities were used by an unknown hacker to conduct an exploit and steal more than $100 million from the BNB Chain’s cross-chain bridge last Friday.
However, it is mentioned that the hard fork upgrade did not affect users and their funds, while node operators followed a few steps, such as stopping the previous node, which was running, and replacing it with a new binary. According to Binance, withdrawals and deposits remained suspended for an hour before the execution of the hard fork.
Binance Looks To Proceed Further
During conducting the exploit on the BNB smart chain, the hacker used fake security proofs and accelerated a loophole in the iavl hash check, a security layer in the network. This allowed the fraudster to mint over 2 million BNB tokens worth $560 million. However, the exploiter was able to transfer nearly $100 million worth of BNB using third-party chains, including Ethereum, Fantom, Polygon, Avalanche, and Arbitrum. At the same time, a significant amount of non-transferred tokens ($460 million) remained in the hacker’s BNB wallet on the chain.
The cross-chain bridge of Binance allows customers to exchange and transfer assets between two chains that come under the BNB smart chain network: The beacon chain and the Smart chain. The BNB Beacon Chain manages the network’s staking and governance, while the Smart Chain is implemented as an Ethereum Virtual Machine-compatible smart contract platform to build and build decentralized apps on the chain. Both of these chains are able to connect to other third-party blockchains by using the Token Hub bridge.
It is expected that the hard fork upgrade will re-enable the BNB chain, resuming all the operations and securing the overall infrastructure of the chain. With this upgrade, the Binance team is expected to proceed to the next steps, which include a governance vote to decide whether to burn the hacker’s BNB holdings or freeze them.
