Hoskinson Points to Wanchain Bridge Exploit as Case for Moving Beyond Legacy Bridges

Midnight’s NIGHT token has partially recovered after crashing to an all-time low following a bridge exploit earlier this week, with Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson using the incident to argue for a broader shift away from traditional cross chain bridge infrastructure.

What Happened

The token dropped roughly 43% after attackers stole 290 million NIGHT tokens through a vulnerability in a legacy bridge connecting Binance and Cardano. Within 24 hours, the token rebounded nearly 19%, trading around $0.022. Hoskinson pushed back against coverage he felt focused only on the crash while ignoring the recovery.

Hoskinson’s Broader Comments

While acknowledging the seriousness of the exploit, Hoskinson described it in relatively casual terms during a media interview, framing it as part of a wider pattern of software vulnerabilities affecting the entire industry. He pointed to a rise in software security flaws that he linked to increasingly capable AI systems being used to discover exploits, noting that even strong security measures eventually fail if targeted persistently enough.

A Longstanding Problem in Crypto

Bridge exploits have remained one of the most costly and recurring security issues in the crypto industry, with past incidents collectively resulting in losses exceeding a billion dollars. These attacks typically target the technical infrastructure that allows tokens to move between different blockchains. Hoskinson argued that newer cryptographic approaches, including those used in Midnight’s design, could eliminate the need for trusted intermediaries altogether by relying on mathematical proofs instead.