What happened
On November 3, 2022, about 55.6 billion pGALA, nominally worth around $1 billion, were minted on BNB Smart Chain in a short burst (mint tx 0x4b239b0a92b8375ca293e0fde9386cbe6bbeb2f04bc23e7c80147308b9515c2e). pGALA was the bridged version of Gala Games' GALA token, issued by the pNetwork cross-chain bridge. Part of the new supply was sold into the pGALA/BNB pool on PancakeSwap for about 12,976 BNB (roughly $4.3-4.5 million). pGALA's price collapsed, and Ethereum GALA fell about 13% that day.
The mint was made by pNetwork itself, from address 0x6891a233bca9e72a078bcb71ba02ad482a44e8c1. pNetwork said a misconfiguration of its bridge meant pGALA had to be redeployed and left the old contract open to theft. It minted the tokens and drained the pool to stop trading in pGALA that could no longer be redeemed, and called this a white-hat action. Reports of its post-mortem say a pNetwork engineer had mistakenly embedded a key in the contract about two months earlier.
Gala Games said its own GALA token was not hacked and that it was not consulted before the mint. HTX (Huobi) called the action a premeditated attack for profit. pNetwork promised to reimburse pGALA holders and PancakeSwap LPs pro rata from a snapshot, returning the collected BNB and airdropping replacement tokens.
How it happened
- pGALA on BNB Smart Chain was issued by the pNetwork bridge, and the bridge controlled the token's mint function.
- pNetwork found a misconfiguration in the pGALA deployment that, it said, could have let a malicious actor take control of the contract; it decided to redeploy pGALA.
- Using privileged access, an address linked to pNetwork minted about 55.6 billion pGALA.
- That address sold the minted pGALA into the PancakeSwap pGALA/BNB pool, draining about 12,976 BNB and crashing pGALA's price.
- pNetwork presented the drain as a protective white-hat action and promised pro-rata reimbursement to holders and LPs; Gala Games and HTX disputed how it was handled.
Protocol details
Evidence
- report Report gala.com
- transaction bscscan.com transaction 0x439a…616d bscscan.com
- transaction bscscan.com transaction 0x4b23…5c2e bscscan.com
- address bscscan.com address 0x6891…e8C1 bscscan.com
- address bscscan.com address 0xe871…d20f bscscan.com
- analysis Developers of pNetwork bridge drain $4.3 million from PancakeSwap in 'white hat' attack theblock.co
- analysis Huobi Says pNetwork Hacked Gala in a Premeditated Attack to Make Profits securities.io
- analysis Gala Games 'hack' underscores the complexities of many cross-chain interactions hashdex.com
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