A hacker transformed a quarter‑bitcoin into 46 billion counterfeit BTC tokens via a DeFi bridge
In a dramatic illustration of how vulnerabilities in decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols can be weaponised, a single attacker managed to inflate a modest 0.25 BTC holding into a staggering 46 billion synthetic Bitcoin tokens (syBTC) on the Symbiosis bridge. The exploit hinged on two separate software bugs that, when combined, allowed the malicious actor to mint an amount of synthetic Bitcoin t…
Sept. 15, 2026, 1:43 p.m.