Newmont (NEM) token, BNB Chain hack — October 2026

The NEM/USDT liquidity pool of a BNB Chain token called Newmont (NEM) was drained in a single transaction at 03:28:50 UTC on 21 October 2026. This registry read the transaction receipt: the pool lost 821,920.44 USDT and the attacker’s address kept 726,307.10 USDT. Nothing in the sources connects the token to Newmont Corporation, the mining company; it carries the same name.

According to Defimon and BlockSec Phalcon, the NEM contract had a “sell-destroy” mechanism that anyone could trigger. It burned NEM directly from the pair’s balance, sized from a pending counter of recent sells, and then called sync(), which cut the pool’s recorded NEM reserve while its USDT reserve stayed the same. The attacker flash-borrowed USDT from several lenders, sent NEM to the pool to inflate the pending counter, took most of it back with skim(), and triggered the burn, repeating the cycle 42 times until only about 29 NEM was left in the pool. A small NEM sale then bought out the pool’s USDT.

The headline is the pool’s loss. The difference of about $95,600 between that and the attacker’s take went, in the same transaction, to the PancakeSwap pools the attacker borrowed from, as flash-swap and flash-loan fees. Defimon reported that the attacker’s address was freshly funded through Tornado Cash. No statement from the token’s team had appeared by 22 October, and nothing has been reported as returned.