Binance Pauses Withdrawals Amid $5M Ankr 'Infinite Mint' HackBinance CEO Changpeng Zhao announced that the exchange had paused withdrawals following an exploit on the crypto node project Ankr.
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Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao announced that the crypto exchange had paused withdrawals linked to a recent attack on Ankr.
"Initial analysis is developer private key was hacked, and the hacker updated the smart contract to a more malicious one," wrote Zhao. "Binance paused withdrawals a few hours ago. Also froze about $3m that hackers move to our CEX."
Ankr is a distributed node operator for proof-of-stake networks, letting users stake their tokens easily without having to buy the necessary hardware.

It was hacked in the early hours of Friday, with the attacker leveraging the smart contract for the aBNBc token that allowed them to create an infinite amount of this token. This token represents a staked version of Binance's BNB token that earns rewards on Ankr. The token's price has collapsed 99.5% since the attack, according to CoinGecko.
The number of tokens created is unclear, but some reports indicate that they were able to mint as much as 60 trillion aBNBc tokens
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