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Hackers Minted 329 Trillion Fake SAND Tokens and Walked Away With $675000

Startupfortune • August 23, 2026

Attackers exploited a LayerZero delegate-permission flaw in The Sandbox's cross-chain SAND bridge on August 22, minting tokens worth $49 billion on paper across Base and BNB Chain. The real loss was $675,000, roughly 14.75 million SAND drained and converted to 80 ETH before The Sandbox shut down bridging on the affected chains.

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This article is one source in a clustered incident — the cluster page carries the summary, timeline and every other outlet covering it.

The Sandbox Exploit: 14.9B Unbacked SAND Tokens Minted on Base and BNB Chain On August 22, 2026, The Sandbox reported a security breach that allowed an attacker to mint 14.9 billion unbacked SAND tokens on the Base and BNB Smart Chain networks. The exploit involved hijacking LayerZero delegate permissions via the `approveAndCall` function, resulting in an estimated face value of $49 billion in unauthorized tokens. The Sandbox quickly disabled bridging to and from these networks, isolating the compromised tokens and preventing further transfers. The company stated that the actual impact was less than 0.01% of the total SAND supply, and no user wallets were compromised. Major South Korean exchanges, Upbit and Bithumb, suspended SAND transactions as a precaution. The Sandbox is preparing a compensation plan for affected liquidity providers and plans to release a full post-mortem report. 22 sources 68

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Hackers Minted 329 Trillion Fake SAND Tokens and Walked Away With $675000

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