A Wanchain bridge exploit on Monday wiped out 290 million NIGHT tokens in one go, sending Midnight's native coin down roughly 43% to an all-time low. Within 24 hours it had recovered nearly 19%, trading around $0.022. Charles Hoskinson was quick to point out that most coverage buried the rebound: "Magically, they forget to mention the rebound," he wrote on X.
The stolen tokens were dumped through a legacy bridge on the Binance-Cardano corridor, a third-party setup that Hoskinson was careful to distance from Midnight's own architecture. The corridor has since become the latest data point in a very long list of cross-chain bridge disasters. Ronin, Wormhole and Nomad alone collectively shed over $1.5 billion in similar attacks, all targeting the smart contracts or multisig arrangements that move tokens between chains.
What the numbers show
The attack unfolded fast. NIGHT hit its all-time low within hours of the exploit, then staged the partial recovery before the day was out. At $0.022 the token is still well below where it was before Monday, but the 19% bounce in under 24 hours is notable given how often hacked assets simply bleed out. Hoskinson described the incident as "a case of the Mondays" in a CoinDesk interview, though he did not downplay the scale.
He pointed to a broader trend: a surge in Linux kernel vulnerabilities that he attributes to AI-powered exploit discovery accelerating across all software, not just crypto. His analogy was blunt. "That's like being 90% resistant to a deadly disease. If you're exposed to it enough, eventually you still catch the disease."
Hoskinson's push for zero-knowledge infrastructure
The Cardano founder used the incident to make the case he has been building for some time. Legacy bridge architecture, he argued, is structurally flawed because it requires users to trust operators and multisig setups. Zero-knowledge systems like Midnight are designed to remove that dependency entirely, substituting cryptographic proofs for human-controlled chokepoints.
It is a position the industry keeps circling back to after each major bridge exploit, and Monday's attack gives Hoskinson fresh ammunition. Whether NIGHT's recovery holds or fades back toward its new all-time low will likely depend on how quickly the team can show the corridor vulnerability was contained.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any asset.
