Sandbox bridge exploit mints 14.9B SAND; Coinbase to delist

On Aug. 21 an exploit of The Sandbox’s cross-chain bridges on Base and BNB Smart Chain allowed an attacker to mint roughly 14.9 billion unbacked SAND tokens across two addresses, according to blockchain-security firm PeckShield.

The bridges normally work by locking SAND on a source chain, typically Ethereum, and minting an equivalent amount on the destination chain. A flaw in the minting mechanism let the mint function run on Base and BSC without matching collateral locked on Ethereum, producing a large volume of tokens with no backing.

The minted amount far exceeded SAND’s official total supply cap of 3 billion tokens, representing nearly five times the declared supply. The Sandbox confirmed that SAND held on Ethereum and Polygon and the assets locked on Ethereum that back the token were not affected, and that genuine backing at risk was under 0.01% of the total supply.

The platform immediately disabled bridging on Base and BNB Smart Chain to stop further movement of the fabricated tokens and advised users to avoid trading SAND on those networks until bridging is restored. The Sandbox is preparing compensation for eligible liquidity providers whose positions were affected and plans a post-mortem and a security audit before reactivating the bridges.

Coinbase has scheduled the delisting of ten perpetual futures contracts, including SAND, effective Aug. 26. Open futures positions will be settled automatically on that date. The exchange’s action follows a review of trading volume and liquidity across its derivatives markets.

Mint-based bridge exploits have appeared elsewhere in 2026. Earlier incidents included the unauthorized creation of 1 billion DOT on a Polkadot bridge and about 13.76 million ALPH on another bridge. Industry tallies show bridge-related exploits accounted for more than $320 million in losses in the first half of the year.