NIGHT, the token behind Cardano’s privacy-focused Midnight network, plunged more than 43% earlier today to hit an all-time low of $0.01524.

Speculation then mounted that the Midnight blockchain may have been hacked, causing the steep selloff, but according to The Midnight Foundation, the price drop came after roughly 2% of NIGHT’s supply was moved out of a two-year-old contract tied to Wanchain’s Cardano-to-BNB Chain bridge.

Foundation Says Blockchain Was Not Hacked

Independent on-chain researcher Paul was among the first to flag the withdrawal and noted in his preliminary findings that between 14:46 and 14:55 UTC on Monday, some 515 million NIGHT tokens had been withdrawn from a contract identified as Wanchain’s Cardano-side bridge lock address, which backs the Wanchain-wrapped NIGHT on BNB. Nothing else in that contract, including Mynth, XER, and WMT, was touched.

According to his analysis, around 290 million tokens were then sold across decentralized exchanges, sending the price down, while another 200 million were transferred to a second wallet, leaving what he described as a large unsold overhang. Furthermore, he said that the total NIGHT supply itself did not change, meaning no new tokens had been minted.

Soon after, the Midnight Foundation published a community update on X, saying it was aware of reports involving the Wanchain Cardano-to-BNB bridge and stressed that the available information pointed to a cross-chain bridge issue and not a problem with the Midnight network. It also urged users to only rely on official updates and to watch out for phishing attempts while investigations were going on.

In a second statement, issued a few hours later, the organization confirmed that Midnight’s protocol, validator network, consensus mechanism, and core infrastructure were all operating normally.

CoinGecko data shows that before the plunge, NIGHT had traded as high as $0.026, with the sudden sale of 290 million tokens dragging it down to $0.01524, its lowest ever price level. It has since pulled back some of those losses and was trading more than 28% above that ATL at the time of writing, although it was still 27% in the red over 24 hours. It has also erased all the gains it had made in the last year and is about 34% lower than where it was a week ago.

Bridge Security Back in the Spotlight

Cardano co-founder Charles Hoskinson also weighed in, saying an automated alert on his phone had flagged NIGHT’s unusual price action, after which the Midnight Foundation and other parties set up an informal war room to track the situation as it unfolded.

His message boiled down to three points: that Midnight’s own smart contracts had kept on running without interruption; the problem came from one of the four components in Wanchain’s bridge architecture; and that the industry needs to be more vigilant given how fast AI tools can now find such flaws.

According to Hoskinson, bridge infrastructure is one of the weakest points in crypto because it depends on trust assumptions outside the underlying blockchain. But he believes that technologies, including zero-knowledge proof-based bridges and trusted execution environments, as well as multisig systems, could reduce such risks.

His point on AI is something OpenZeppelin co-founder Manuel Aráoz touched on in late May, when he warned people to get out of DeFi, saying AI-powered coding agents have tilted the security game in favor of attackers, making it difficult for any protocol to hold user funds with any level of confidence. DeFi Investor, an analyst who monitors the sector, repeated the warning recently when Anthropic announced the launch of its Mythos AI, which experts say is extremely good at finding software vulnerabilities.

Source: CryptoPotato