Midnight's NIGHT token rebounds 19% after Wanchain bridge hack

Midnight's NIGHT token rebounds 19% after Wanchain bridge hack

Finance

Midnight token rebounds 19% after Wanchain bridge hack, Hoskinson calls for ZK revamp

Charles Hoskinson says the exploit, which briefly sent NIGHT to an all-time low, underscores why the industry needs to move beyond legacy bridge infrastructure.

By

Oliver Knight

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Edited by

Jamie Crawley

Jul 22, 2026, 11:45 a.m.

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Consensus 2025: Charles Hoskinson, CEO & Founder, Input Output

Summary

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A Wanchain bridge exploit on Monday drained 290 million NIGHT tokens, sending the price down roughly 43% to an all-time low before a partial recovery brought it back nearly 19% within 24 hours.

Hoskinson blamed legacy bridge architecture built by a third party and said AI-powered exploit discovery is accelerating vulnerabilities across all software, not just crypto.

He argued zero-knowledge systems like Midnight are the long-term fix, replacing trust in bridge operators and multisigs with cryptographic proofs.

Midnight's NIGHT token staged a sharp recovery after crashing to an all-time low following a bridge exploit earlier this week, with Charles Hoskinson using the incident to make a broader case for rethinking crypto security from the ground up.

NIGHT fell roughly 43% after 290 million tokens were stolen and dumped through a legacy Wanchain bridge on the Binance-Cardano corridor. The token has since bounced nearly 19% in 24 hours, trading around $0.022. Hoskinson pushed back at coverage that focused only on the crash. "Magically, they forget to mention the rebound," he

posted on X

.

Hoskinson described the hack as a "case of the Mondays" in an

interview with CoinDesk

but did acknowledge its seriousness in the broader context.

"All software is under this enormous assault," he said, pointing to a surge in Linux kernel vulnerabilities he attributed to AI-powered exploit discovery. He was direct about the limits of even well-built systems: "That's like being 90% resistant to a deadly disease. If you're exposed to it enough, eventually you still catch the disease."

Bridge hacks have been one of crypto's most persistent and costly attack vectors for years. Billions of dollars have been drained through cross-chain bridge exploits, including the Ronin, Wormhole and Nomad attacks, which collectively lost over $1.5 billion. The attacks typically target the smart contracts or multisig setups that facilitate token transfers between chains.

Hoskinson said zero-knowledge systems like Midnight are designed to eliminate that trust dependency entirely, replacing bridge operators and multisigs with cryptographic proofs.

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