ADA rises after NIGHT bridge hack hits Cardano-linked project

Cardano traders are separating a bridge failure from the base network itself. While a Wanchain-operated bridge tied to Midnight was exploited for about 515 million NIGHT tokens, ADA still climbed nearly 8% and moved back toward $0.20 after Cardano's van Rossem hard fork.

The exploit hit infrastructure linking Cardano to BNB Chain. Midnight said the breach was limited to third-party bridge systems and did not affect its protocol, validator network, consensus, or core infrastructure. The NIGHT smart contract on Cardano also kept working. BlockSec's early review pointed to a possible flaw in signed-message encoding inside the TreasuryCheck validator, though the firm said its findings were still preliminary.

NIGHT fell more than 30% after the attack and briefly touched about $0.015, putting the stolen tokens at roughly $9 million to $10 million during the sell-off. Wanchain paused the affected bridge, and Midnight said exchanges including Binance, Kraken, KuCoin, Bybit, OKX, Gate, and MEXC took steps to restrict the stolen funds.

ADA's move higher came three days after Cardano activated protocol version 11, which expanded Plutus smart contract features and tightened ledger rules through the network's on-chain governance process. Santiment data also showed ADA's 30-day MVRV turning positive, meaning many recent buyers are back in profit, which can also raise the chance of short-term selling.