The Sandbox’s SAND token suffered a major cross-chain exploit on August 21-22, allowing an attacker to create roughly 329.24 trillion unbacked tokens over about five hours. Despite the staggering figure, the attacker extracted only about $675,000 in real economic value.
The incident highlights the difference between token balances displayed on-chain and assets that can actually be redeemed or sold. The reported 329 trillion SAND represented a nominal value of roughly $49 billion, but most of those tokens had no corresponding reserves.
How the SAND exploit unfolded
The attacker exploited the Base deployment of SAND through its LayerZero omnichain configuration. Investigators found that the token’s approveAndCall function was used to hijack LayerZero delegate permissions.
That access gave the attacker the ability to authorize unauthorized minting on Base. The activity generated 329.24 trillion SAND across 703 minting events involving 173 wallets.
The legitimate SAND supply on Ethereum remained capped at 3 billion tokens. Therefore, the newly created Base tokens were effectively unbacked and could not simply be redeemed against the Ethereum reserves.
The key figure was the amount that actually left the reserves
While the headline mint looked catastrophic, the attacker’s actual extraction was far smaller. Approximately 14.75 million SAND was drained from the Ethereum-side OFT adapter and converted into roughly 80 ETH, worth about $675,000 at the time.
The Sandbox responded by disabling cross-chain bridging involving Base and BNB Smart Chain. Ethereum and Polygon reserves were not compromised, according to available incident reporting.
The exploit demonstrates why a token’s apparent market value can be misleading during a smart-contract attack. Multiplying a legitimate market price by an enormous quantity of newly minted tokens does not mean that amount of liquidity exists.
For The Sandbox, the immediate financial loss was therefore measured in hundreds of thousands of dollars, not tens of billions. However, the incident still exposed serious risks in cross-chain permission controls and raised fresh concerns about the security of token bridge infrastructure.
