The Sandbox plans 1:1 repayment after $700,000 bridge exploit

The Sandbox pledged to repay eligible SAND holders 1:1 after an Aug. 21 bridge exploit. The exploit drained about 14.744 million SAND from an Ethereum vault. The drained tokens were worth about $700,000. Users who legitimately held bridged SAND on Base or BNB Smart Chain before the attack will receive an equal amount of Ethereum-based SAND. The Sandbox treasury will fund the compensation. The project will not mint new tokens. The claims process is expected to open within two weeks. The process is expected to remain open for another two weeks. Two centralized exchanges hold more than 72% of eligible balances. Those exchanges will distribute compensation directly to affected customers. The Sandbox said a configuration flaw in the Base and BNB Chain contracts enabled the attacker to become the sole verifier of incoming bridge messages. The flaw allowed the attacker to mint unbacked tokens. About 14.7 million SAND was drained from the two networks. That amount represented about 0.5% of SAND's 3 billion maximum supply. More than 339 trillion unbacked SAND was minted on Base and BNB Chain. The project isolated those tokens. The tokens cannot be bridged or redeemed. SAND on Ethereum and Polygon was unaffected. The compromised bridge contracts will be permanently retired. Any future Base or BNB Chain bridges will use newly deployed contracts. SAND traded at about $0.04 at the time of publication. CoinGecko reported that SAND was down 10.4% over the previous seven days.