GANA Payment Exploit Drains Over $3.1 Million on BNB Chain

Highlights:

• The GANA Payment exploit has drained over $3 million in assets.
• Funds were laundered across both BNB Smart Chain and Ethereum.
• The attacker used Tornado Cash for mixing funds and making recovery difficult.

Decentralized payment token project GANA Payment on the BNB Smart Chain has become a recent victim of an exploit. The hack drained more than $3.1 million of crypto assets, which highlighted the weaknesses in the ecosystem. The exploit was uncovered by blockchain investigator ZachXBT, revealing the pace at which the attacker proceeded and laundered the stolen money.

GANA Payment Exploit Details

The GANA Payment exploit occurred swiftly, with the hacker consolidating the stolen funds in a single wallet. The funds, mostly comprised of BNB and ETH, were quickly swapped and laundered throughout various chains. ZachXBT noted that the hacker first moved 1,140 BNB, which was approximately $1.04 million, into Tornado Cash on the BNB Chain.

The hacker then bridged the assets to Ethereum. On Ethereum, the attacker deposited 346.8 ETH worth $1.05 million into Tornado Cash. The whole cross-chain movement and use of Tornado Cash greatly increased the difficulty for the investigators to follow the trail of the stolen funds. At the time of reporting, the stolen funds are still in the hacker’s Ethereum wallet, dormant.

吴说获悉，据 ZachXBT 监测，GANA Payment 在 BNB Chain 遭攻击，损失金额超过 310 万美元。攻击者已将 1140 枚 BNB（约 104 万美元）通过 Tornado Cash 混币，并将部分资金跨链至以太坊网络：其中 346.8 枚 ETH（约 105 万美元）已存入以太坊端的 Tornado Cash，约 346 枚 ETH（约 104.6…

— 吴说区块链 (@wublockchain12) November 20, 2025

Moreover, the theft caused GANA Payment’s token to lose a significant part of its value. The token has dropped by over 90% to trade around $0.2548 after the incident. The absence of consistent audits and security documentation for the project might have been one of the factors that led to the attack.

Laundering Process Complicates Recovery

Once the funds were stolen, the hacker immediately started the laundering process. The process used Tornado Cash both on the BNB Chain and Ethereum to obscure the trail of the stolen assets. The initial transfer of 1,140 BNB into Tornado Cash on the BNB Chain raised the level of difficulty for tracing the origin of the funds further.

The hacker transferred the remaining Ethereum assets into Tornado Cash and then repeated the same practice. The application of Tornado Cash on both BNB and Ethereum networks indicates that the hacker was determined to make the recovery of the stolen funds as hard as possible.

Investigators are still trying to follow up on the trails of the remaining stolen assets. The attacker’s Ethereum wallet still contains a large amount of assets. Moreover, such clean execution shows how swiftly the attackers can disperse funds in several chains, making it hard to recover.

Broader Impact in the DeFi Sector

The GANA Payment exploit is not the first instance of breach of security in the small-scale BNB Chain projects. BSC-based projects have already suffered more than $100 million in multiple exploits, according to DefiLlama, in 2025 alone. This trend is repeated in most attacks where a contract vulnerability, liquidity pool hazard, or key compromise attack causes a quick draining of the assets.

Other notable attacks involve the Balancer protocol being hit by an exploit. Balancer lost over $129 million in its v2 pools on November 3. A few days later, the Berachain Foundation was able to recover approximately $12.8 million, which had been stolen through the exploit.

#PeckShieldAlert @balancer has been drained ~$70.8M worth of cryptos, including 6,851.12 $osETH (~$27M), 6,587.44 $WETH (~$24.5M) & 4,259.84 $wstETH (19.3M) https://t.co/mcmlPnJDaM pic.twitter.com/j3KJXV7pd3

— PeckShieldAlert (@PeckShieldAlert) November 3, 2025