By Isaac • September 15, 2026 7:08 pm •
A quarter’s worth of Bitcoin was enough to expose one of the ugliest truths about cross-chain finance: a bridge can manufacture a mountain of Bitcoin-branded tokens without creating a single real bitcoin.
An attacker deposited just 330 satoshis, worth roughly 25 cents, into the Symbiosis Bitcoin Bridge and exploited two software flaws to mint about 46.1 billion unbacked syBTC tokens. That is more than 2,000 times Bitcoin’s fixed 21 million supply, according to CoinDesk’s review of the project’s post-mortem and blockchain data.
The first flaw let the attacker trick the bridge into treating the same address as an approved depositor and an administrator. The second turned a negative fee into an addition.
Put together, those mistakes
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