Cardano's ADA slipped about 3% to $0.1715 on Wednesday, giving back some of the previous day's 7% rally, after a $9 million exploit on the Wanchain bridge that connects Cardano to BNB Chain. The attacker drained roughly 515 million NIGHT tokens from the bridge's reserves, sending the token's price into a tailspin.
How the exploit worked
The breach stemmed from a signed message encoding flaw in the TreasuryCheck validator, according to the project's post-mortem. That bug let the attacker reuse signatures to authorize multiple withdrawals — essentially a signature replay attack. The stolen funds were bridge reserves, not user wallets, and Midnight's core blockchain and validators stayed untouched.
Market fallout
NIGHT token dropped more than 30% in the hours after the news, briefly touching a record low near $0.015 before stabilizing. For ADA, the timing isn't great. The token had just broken a short-term downtrend with that 7% jump, but now it's back testing the $0.16 support zone. If that level fails, sellers could push price toward $0.15 or lower. On the upside, the $0.18 to $0.20 area remains a tough resistance wall. A clean reclaim of $0.20 with volume might open a path to $0.25.
What Hoskinson said
Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson linked the Wanchain bridge hack to AI threats, though he didn't provide specific details. His comment came during a broader discussion about security risks in cross-chain infrastructure.
LiquidChain presale update
In separate news, LiquidChain — a Layer 3 project building a Unified Liquidity Layer that fuses Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana liquidity — has raised $915K in its presale. The current price per $LIQUID token is $0.01482. The project is still in its early fundraising phase.
