BounceBit to Sunset Its Blockchain, Migrate to BNB Chain After $3 Million Exploit

BounceBit is shutting down its standalone blockchain for good. The project will migrate to BNB Chain after an attacker exploited an authorization flaw and made off with roughly $3 million in native BB tokens, the platform confirmed Friday.

Rather than patch and continue, BounceBit plans to retire the chain entirely, reissue BB as a BEP-20 token on BNB Chain, and use a pre-attack snapshot to cancel the unauthorized transfers. It is an unusually drastic call for a mid-size exploit, and it puts the project’s CeDeFi Bitcoin-restaking model under a harsher light.

The attacker drained approximately 286.5 million BB from nine wallets before block production stopped about 40 minutes later, The Block reported. Nine wallets. One exploit. The incident played out between Wednesday and Thursday, BounceBit said in a Friday update cited by The Block.

The vulnerability lived in the Evmos stack that BounceBit built its Layer 1 on. A smart-contract caller could designate a different account as the source of funds. The system never checked whether that account had authorized the transaction.

BounceBit stressed the breach was narrow. “No private key was compromised, no signature was forged, and no wallet, hardware device, or exchange account was breached,” the project said. CeDeFi Strategy, Promo Vaults, Prime, and real-world asset products were untouched.

The team will not patch the chain. It will rebuild on BNB Chain and reissue BB via a snapshot taken before the attack. Holders should receive reissued tokens automatically, per BounceBit’s plan. The platform is coordinating with exchanges to adjust customer balances so users do not eat the losses.

Why retire the chain instead of fixing it? Timing, partly. Rebuilding on Evmos would be a heavy lift because Evmos itself was discontinued in May, according to Binance Square. Most of BounceBit’s products and users already sit on BNB Chain.

“Maintaining a standalone Layer 1 is no longer the most effective way to serve our users,” BounceBit said.

BounceBit launched in early 2024 as a Bitcoin restaking protocol. It raised $6 million in seed funding co-led by Blockchain Capital and Breyer Capital, The Block reported. The platform later branched into CeDeFi yield strategies and tokenized real-world assets, with plans to offer tokenized stocks from the U.S., Europe, Hong Kong, and Japan.

Two things remain unclear: whether the snapshot reissue actually neutralizes the attacker’s haul or just cancels it on a dying chain, and how long the BNB Chain migration will take. BounceBit has not given a timeline.