What happened
On June 2, 2025, an attacker drained about $3.9 million from Force Bridge, the Nervos Network cross-chain bridge run by Magickbase, two days after Magickbase announced it would sunset the bridge over six months. Reported losses were about $3 million on Ethereum (roughly 257,800 USDT, 898,300 USDC, 60,400 DAI, 539 ETH and 0.79 WBTC) and about $800,000 on BNB Chain, including about 874 BNB. Halborn puts the total at $3.76 million.
Hacken and Halborn attributed the drain to an access control failure: the attacker called privileged functions to unlock the bridge's locked tokens. Halborn says this points to compromised private keys rather than a code bug, though no official root-cause report was found. The stolen assets were swapped to ETH and laundered through Tornado Cash and FixedFloat.
Magickbase paused the bridge and opened an investigation.
How it happened
- On May 31, 2025, Magickbase announced it would sunset Force Bridge, citing low usage and high maintenance costs. Halborn reports the attacker funded the attack wallet shortly afterward.
- From about 01:30 UTC on June 2, the attacker made several failed attempts over roughly six hours, including a small test withdrawal of about $25 around 02:23 UTC.
- At about 07:36 UTC, the attacker used privileged unlock functions to drain about 874 BNB from the BNB Chain bridge contract.
- Later that day, the attacker released the Ethereum-side locked assets (stablecoins, ETH and WBTC) and further funds on both chains to attacker-controlled wallets.
- The tokens were converted to ETH and routed through Tornado Cash and FixedFloat across new intermediary wallets.
- Magickbase detected abnormal activity, paused Force Bridge and began an investigation.
Protocol details
Evidence
- report @hackenclub incident report x.com
- report @CyversAlerts incident report x.com
- report @magickbase incident report x.com
- analysis DeFiLlama defillama.com
- analysis Explained: The Force Bridge Hack (June 2025) halborn.com
- analysis Hackers drain over $3 million in crypto from Nervos Network's Force cross-chain bridge, say security analysts theblock.co
- analysis Nervos Network suffers major exploit as $3.9M in crypto is stolen from Force Bridge crypto.news
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