• A legacy Wanchain bridge connecting Binance and Cardano was exploited Monday, draining roughly 290 million NIGHT tokens before they were sold into the market.
• NIGHT crashed about 43% to an all-time low near $0.022 before staging a 19% rebound within 24 hours, per CoinDesk.
• Charles Hoskinson used the incident to argue that zero-knowledge cryptographic proofs — the design underpinning Midnight — should replace bridge operators and multisig custodians.
• The exploit adds to a run of cross-chain bridge failures, including Ronin, Wormhole and Nomad, that have collectively cost the industry more than $1.5 billion.
• Hoskinson linked the incident to a broader, unverified claim that AI-assisted vulnerability discovery is accelerating attacks against software generally.

A legacy Wanchain bridge linking Binance and Cardano was exploited Monday, CoinDesk reported. Attackers drained approximately 290 million NIGHT tokens — the native asset of Midnight, the Cardano-affiliated privacy chain — and sold them into thin liquidity, crashing the price roughly 43% to an all-time low near $0.022 before a 19% rebound within 24 hours. Midnight's core protocol was not the target; the exploited component was the older bridge infrastructure connecting the two chains.

The market reaction

NIGHT's 19% rebound came within 24 hours of the crash low, per CoinDesk, but the token remained well below pre-exploit levels near $0.022. The drop erased a large share of NIGHT's market value in a single session — a reminder that bridge-held liquidity, not the underlying chain's security model, was the point of failure. CoinDesk's report did not publish an independently confirmed USD total for the 290 million token drain itself, distinct from the broader industry loss figures it cited.

Hoskinson's zero-knowledge pitch

Charles Hoskinson said the exploit reinforces the case for replacing bridge operators and multisig custodians with cryptographic proofs, CoinDesk reported. Zero-knowledge systems like Midnight are designed to eliminate that trust dependency entirely, he argued — validity proven mathematically rather than by trusting a bridge operator's key custody. He also pointed to AI-accelerated vulnerability discovery as a broader threat, saying "all software is under this enormous assault," per CoinDesk. That characterization is his own and was not independently verified in the report.

A pattern, not an anomaly

This is not an isolated bridge failure. CoinDesk's report places the Wanchain exploit alongside Ronin, Wormhole and Nomad — three bridge hacks that collectively cost the industry more than $1.5 billion. Bridges remain a recurring weak point in crypto infrastructure because they concentrate custody of cross-chain assets in a small set of operators or multisig keys, a single point of failure that has repeatedly been the entry point for attackers across multiple chains, per CoinDesk's reporting.

What this means for treasuries and platforms

For treasuries and platforms holding NIGHT or routing value through the Binance-Cardano corridor, the takeaway is custody design, not price direction. Legacy bridge contracts that predate a project's current security posture stay live attack surface even after a network upgrades elsewhere. Risk teams should confirm which bridge contracts remain in active use, whether current audits cover them, and whether proof-based rails have actually replaced multisig-custodied paths before treating a price rebound as the incident being resolved.