The Sandbox announced a compensation plan for its August 22 bridge exploit, committing to repay every wallet that legitimately held bridged SAND on Base or BNB Smart Chain 1:1 in SAND on the Ethereum network. A claim window for affected users will open within two weeks and remain active for a subsequent two-week period.
Entitlements are fixed based on on-chain balances recorded immediately before the first unauthorized mint. This snapshot occurred at Base block 50,283,176 and BNB Smart Chain block 117,321,965. Any holder actions since the exploit do not affect the owed amount.
Most affected users will not need to take action. Two centralized exchanges collectively hold more than 72 percent of the affected balance. The Sandbox is in direct contact with both exchanges, and compensation will be processed directly through them, bypassing individual claims.
For other eligible holders, The Sandbox will publish a complete entitlement list through a blog post. This information will be released concurrently with the claim details, allowing holders to verify their balances before initiating a claim.
Claiming requires only a transaction from the wallet that held the SAND at the snapshot block. The process does not involve approving a token, signing an off-chain message, or sending any assets. This specific design acts as a countermeasure against potential scams.
Both The Sandbox and Animoca Brands warn that they will never contact holders first to offer token recovery, swaps, or unlocks. Any such unsolicited approach is fraudulent. Compensation relies solely on balances already recorded on-chain and will be announced exclusively through official company channels.
Holders who do not claim on Ethereum within the initial window will retain their entitlement. The same amount will become available on Base and BNB Smart Chain once replacement contracts are deployed.
All compensation will originate from The Sandbox treasury. No new SAND tokens will be minted, ensuring the Ethereum supply remains at 3,000,000,000 tokens, consistent before, during, and after the incident. This decision maintains tokenomics for all holders.
SAND holdings on Ethereum and Polygon networks were unaffected by the exploit. Polygon utilizes a separate bridge that was outside the compromised path. Users can continue holding, transferring, staking, and trading SAND on either of these networks without needing to take any action.
The Sandbox has permanently retired the bridge contracts on Base and BNB Smart Chain. Cross-chain transfers via the original affected bridges are no longer possible.
The company cites two primary reasons for this permanent retirement. First, the exploited function is fixed within the deployed bytecode due to the absence of a proxy contract, preventing its removal, disabling, or patching. Any fix would require entirely new contracts. Second, control over the bridge configuration cannot be durably maintained. The design flaw allows anyone willing to pay the gas fees to repeatedly seize the configuration role. Reclaiming control would only create the appearance of security, not actual security.
The August 22 exploit targeted The Sandbox's SAND cross-chain OFT on Base and BNB Smart Chain, leveraging hijacked LayerZero delegate permissions and an approveAndCall vulnerability. Blockchain security firm Blockaid reported nearly $49 billion in face-value SAND minted across more than 400 transactions. PeckShield identified approximately 14.9 billion SAND on attacker addresses.
Actual on-chain extraction totaled around 14.75 million SAND, valued at approximately $675,000, along with about 79.74 ETH. The Sandbox contained the issue by stopping bridging on Base and BNB Smart Chain and estimated the impact at less than 0.01 percent of the total 3 billion SAND supply. Major centralized exchanges paused activity on these chains. Despite the exploit, SAND traded up 4.76 percent to $0.0476 on August 22, with trading volume increasing 400 percent.
