The Sandbox has committed to a full 1:1 repayment for users who held legitimate bridged SAND tokens on Base or BNB Smart Chain prior to an August 21 exploit. The attack drained approximately 14.7 million SAND, valued at around $700,000 at the time, from an Ethereum vault connected to the project’s cross-chain bridge infrastructure.

In a post-mortem released on August 27, the company stated that compensation will be funded entirely from its existing treasury. No new SAND tokens will be minted, ensuring the circulating and maximum supplies remain unchanged. Eligible holders will receive equivalent amounts of Ethereum-based SAND.

Details of the Reimbursement Process

Claims are expected to open within two weeks of the post-mortem and will remain available for a further two-week period. Two centralized exchanges hold more than 72 percent of the eligible balances. Those platforms will distribute the replacement tokens directly to affected customers, removing the need for individual submissions in most cases.

Holders outside those exchanges will need to use a dedicated claims portal once it launches. The project confirmed that only balances present on Base or BNB Smart Chain before the exploit qualify for repayment.

How the Exploit Unfolded

The attacker took advantage of a configuration flaw in the SAND contracts deployed on Base and BNB Smart Chain. This allowed the address to become the sole verifier of incoming bridge messages, enabling the approval of fraudulent transfers without standard authorization.

As a result, more than 339 trillion unbacked SAND tokens were minted across the two networks. The Sandbox reported that these tokens have been isolated and cannot be bridged back to Ethereum or redeemed against legitimate reserves. The actual value extracted from the Ethereum vault totaled about 14.7 million SAND, representing roughly 0.5 percent of the token’s maximum supply of 3 billion.

SAND held directly on Ethereum and Polygon was not affected by the vulnerability.

Permanent Retirement of Compromised Bridges

The Sandbox has decided not to restore the affected bridge contracts on Base and BNB Smart Chain. Both will be permanently retired. Any future bridges linking SAND to those networks will require entirely new contract deployments.

No timetable has been announced for the introduction of replacement infrastructure. The company indicated that the isolation of the unbacked tokens and the retirement of the compromised contracts form the core of its containment response.

At the time of the post-mortem, SAND was trading near $0.04, down approximately 10.4 percent over the preceding seven days.