BounceBit is permanently retiring its standalone blockchain following a $3 million exploit that drained 286.5 million native BB tokens from nine wallets. The project will migrate its entire ecosystem to BNB Chain rather than patch the compromised Evmos-based chain.
The incident unfolded between Wednesday and Thursday. Block production on the BounceBit chain ceased approximately 40 minutes after the unauthorized transfers began.
The vulnerability resided within the Evmos stack BounceBit used to build its Layer 1. An authorization flaw allowed a smart-contract caller to designate a different account as the source of funds without the system verifying if that account had authorized the transaction.
BounceBit said no private keys were compromised, no signatures were forged, and no hardware wallets or exchange accounts were breached. Specific products—its CeDeFi Strategy, Promo Vaults, Prime, and real-world asset offerings—remained untouched.
As part of the migration, BounceBit will reissue BB tokens as a BEP-20 asset on BNB Chain using a snapshot taken before the attack to ensure accurate balances. Holders are expected to receive reissued tokens automatically. BounceBit is coordinating with exchanges to adjust customer balances and mitigate losses.
The decision to retire the chain entirely stems partly from timing. The Evmos framework itself was discontinued in May, making a rebuild on that stack a significant undertaking. BounceBit also noted that most of its products and users already reside on BNB Chain.
BounceBit launched in early 2024 as a Bitcoin restaking protocol with $6 million in seed funding from Blockchain Capital and Breyer Capital. The platform later expanded to include CeDeFi yield strategies and tokenized real-world assets, with plans to offer tokenized stocks from markets in the U.S. Europe, Hong Kong, and Japan.
Two aspects of the migration remain unclear: whether the pre-attack snapshot fully neutralizes the attacker's ability to profit from the stolen tokens or merely cancels them on the defunct chain. BounceBit has not provided a timeline for the BNB Chain migration.
