The Shiba Inu development team has successfully recovered 4.6 million BONE tokens following a major exploit on the Shibarium Bridge in September 2025, which caused an estimated $4 million in losses. The attack involved a sophisticated flash loan where the attacker borrowed 4.6 million BONE to manipulate validator thresholds, gaining control of 10 out of 12 validator keys and submitting fake checkpoints to disrupt the network. This led to the theft of approximately 224.57 ETH, 92.6 billion SHIB tokens, and $700,000 in KNINE tokens from K9 Finance.
Over a 10-day emergency response, the team, led by developer Kaal Dhairya, contained the breach by migrating over 100 critical ecosystem contracts to multi-signature wallets, rotating all validator signing keys, and introducing a blacklist mechanism to block malicious addresses from staking or withdrawing. The recovery process included correcting legacy unbonding data and extending the withdrawal delay to 30 checkpoints for better anomaly detection. Checkpointing has been restored after testing on Devnet, Puppynet, and Mainnet, with the Plasma Bridge set for a gradual restart.
User compensation plans are underway, though details will be released once safe, and infrastructure upgrades include a partnership with dRPC.org for enhanced RPC services. The team emphasized no bounty was offered due to the attacker's lack of response and ongoing fund movements, focusing instead on protocol security. Despite the breach, SHIB's price rose 7.3% in the past week, while BONE saw a brief spike from $0.165 to $0.294 before stabilizing near $0.202.