Zilliqa Retires Its Legacy Chain and Binance Migrates ZIL 1:1

Binance will move its customers' ZIL onto Zilliqa EVM at one token for one, doing the work for them, crypto.news reported on Wednesday. The legacy Zilliqa network, the older non-EVM side of the chain, is being retired. Two hard forks this month carried exchange balances across, and one venue awaits a third. Behind it sits a defect in the Zilliqa app for Ledger hardware wallets that exposed 6,772 accounts and cost 683.13 million ZIL.

Eight bytes that gave the keys away

The post-mortem, quoted by CryptoSlate in August, describes an application that generated 40 random bytes and then copied the wrong 32 into its signing buffer, keeping eight bytes of zero padding and discarding eight bytes of entropy. That fixed the high 64 bits of every affected nonce at zero. A nonce is the one-time random number a signature depends on to stay secret. Four or more signatures from the same account were then enough to rebuild the private key, CryptoSlate wrote, "in seconds on ordinary hardware." crypto.news describes the same defect as Schnorr signatures with the top 64 bits pinned to zero. It sat in every released version of the app between 2019 and 2026. Neither account carries a statement from Ledger.

Four months before anyone noticed

The stolen total is 683,130,969.66 ZIL across 66 transactions, 51 accounts emptied. The first proven theft is dated 4 March. KuCoin flagged unusual outflows from one of its cold wallets on 19 July, the last attacker transaction landed at 09:19:09 UTC on 20 July, and Zilliqa disabled legacy transactions about three and a half hours later, identifying the cause the next day. A patch went to Ledger on 24 July and an engineer there merged it on 27 July. No source we checked converts the loss into dollars.

Two forks done, one venue still waiting

The first fork ran at 12:58 UTC on 2 September, at block height 34,844,968, lifting exchange balances out of legacy Schnorr wallets into verified EVM addresses. How many venues were in that batch is not agreed. cryptoticker names ten, among them KuCoin, MEXC, Bitvavo and WhiteBit; a blockchain.news flash says eleven and names four. The counts do not reconcile, and the list of ten is the only itemized one. The second fork followed at 07:21 UTC on 22 September, at block 36,383,378, covering twelve venues including CoinEx, HTX, OKX, Gate and Bitget on crypto.news's account. A KuCoin flash from 17 September says Bithumb migrates in a third fork, gives no date, and stands alone in mentioning it. A fork that leaves users with work to do has precedent, as when Mina's Mesa fork left every zkApp verification key out of date.

Reopening transfers is each exchange's decision, not the protocol's. cryptoticker checked three venues on 5 September and found deposits and withdrawals shut at all three while trading carried on. Binance has had legacy deposits and withdrawals suspended since 01:00 UTC on 5 August and says trading, margin, futures and its Earn products stay available through the switch.

The holders who still cannot move

Anyone holding ZIL in their own wallet has nothing to use yet. Zilliqa built a zero-knowledge migration tool so a legacy holder can prove ownership and move a balance without exposing a seed phrase, and its blog targeted mid-September for release. On Wednesday crypto.news reported only that the audit is finished and internal testing is running. The target and the tool's state do not match, and no launch date is public. Hardware-wallet owners have been sent to do this work before, most recently when Coinkite told Coldcard users to migrate as a third sweep landed.

Compensation is unsettled too. The plan is a community vote on tokenomics changes that could include minting tokens for affected holders, with eligibility and mechanics to follow.

"We'd rather give the community a real choice on speed versus other tradeoffs than quietly wait years for a court process," the project wrote.

Tracing continues with authorities, and Zilliqa is limiting what it discloses while that runs. The dated facts are two forks, one pending, and a tool that has not shipped.