A $570 million hack has hit the world's largest criptocurrency exchange, the latest in a series of hacks to affect the sector this year, a company spokeswoman said on Friday.
In a tweet, CEO Changpeng Zhao said that the token was stolen from aBNB Chain that was known as the Binance Smart Chain until February. It's possible to transfer cryptocurrencies between different applications by using a bridge.
The hackers stole around $100 million worth of digital currency, according to Zhao. A total of 2 million of the BNB - worth about $570 million - was withdrawn by the hacker, according to a blog post by the BNB Chain.
The Binance spokeswoman stated in emailed comments that the majority of the BNB remained in the hacker's digital wallet address, while about $100 million worth of UnrecoveredBlockchain bridges have become the target of thefts, which have plagued the sector for a long time.
The BNB Chain is the world's fifth largest token with a market value of some $46 billion, according to CoinGecko data.
In August, Chainalysis said that a total of $2 billion worth of cryptocurrencies has been stolen in 13 different bridge hacks, mostly this year.
In March, hackers stole around $615 million from the Ronin Bridge, used to transfer criptocurrency in and out of the game Axie Infinity, one of the largest heists on record. BNB Chain suspended its entire network for several hours before resuming at around 0630 GMT, it said in a tweet.
It said in its blog post that BNB Chain was able to stop the incident from spreading by contacting the blockchain's validators, entities or individuals who verify transactions. There are 44 validators across multiple time zones, but they didn't give any further details.
BNB Chain said it would introduce a new governance mechanism to counter future hacks, as well as expand the number of validators.
On the Binance website, the BNB Chain is described as a community-driven, open-sourced and decentralized ecosystem.