pNetwork bridge creators steal $4.3 million from PancakeSwap in a “white hat” assault

PNetwork bridge consumed more than $4,300,000 worth of tokens issued on its bridge.

The creators of pNetwork, an independent cross-chain bridge protocol used to move assets across chains, collected $4.3 million in pgala (pegged gala) tokens provided to bridge users in an ethical manner.

The “white hat” hack was carried out today after the team detected a “misconfiguration” in the token’s smart contract, according to an on-chain investigation conducted by security company BlockSec, which alerted The Block. The creators of pNetwork sought to get ahead of any unwanted hackers by “emptying” pgala tokens from PancakeSwap pools containing them. These tokens, issued by pNetwork itself, represent a 1:1 tokenized version of the Gala Games tokens.

When users connect gala tokens from their originating chain, Ethereum, to BNB Chain via a pNetwork bridge, the tokens are issued. Using pNetwork, anybody may secure their assets, including gala tokens, as collateral in the bridge contract and issue tokenized gala, also known as pgala.

The pNetwork team controls the smart contracts that manage the pgala tokens, which may be sold on decentralized BNB Chain exchanges such as PancakeSwap. The team said today that it has identified a setup error that might enable anybody to steal from the pgala smart contract. Due to this, the contract had to be fixed and redeployed immediately. 

Before it could redeploy the token contract, it was necessary to drain the token from liquidity pools and execute a white-hat assault to safeguard the value of the tokens trapped in the bridge contract. To deplete the liquidity of pgala on PancakeSwap, the pNetwork developers created billions of pgala tokens out of thin air and exchanged them for BNB tokens. The team was able to create these tokens because it has contract-granted privileges.

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