The Sandbox has opened compensation claims for SAND holders affected by the August 22 bridge exploit. Anyone who legitimately held bridged SAND on Base or BNB Smart Chain immediately before the incident is entitled to full compensation, paid 1:1 in SAND on Ethereum.

The claim page is live at claim.sandbox.game and open from Tuesday, September 8 to Tuesday, September 22, 2026 at 4 PM UTC.

Eligibility Is Already Decided

Nothing a holder has done since the exploit affects their entitlement. Trading, moving funds, or leaving a balance untouched makes no difference, because the calculation runs entirely off a snapshot taken before the attack.

Entitlements come from on chain balances recorded immediately before the contract was hijacked. On Base that is block 50,283,188, timestamped August 21, 2026 at 23:42:03 UTC. On BNB Smart Chain it is block 117,322,025, timestamped August 21, 2026 at 11:42:44 UTC.

Because the snapshot is fixed and drawn from public on chain data, eligibility requires no form, no documentation, and no proof beyond controlling the wallet in question. The studio described the approach as a restitution model: anyone holding SAND on the affected networks before the incident gets the equivalent amount back in full.

Two Tracks

Holders who kept their SAND on Base or BNB Smart Chain through a centralised exchange need to do nothing. The Sandbox is in discussions with those exchanges to process compensation directly, so affected users are made whole through the exchange rather than claiming individually.

Everyone holding in an individual wallet uses the claim page. That path requires a single transaction from the wallet that held SAND at the time of the snapshot.

What Claiming Does Not Require

The Sandbox was unusually explicit about the mechanics, and for good reason. Compensation events are among the most reliably exploited moments in crypto, because a large group of people are expecting to interact with an unfamiliar contract and are primed to follow instructions.

Claiming requires no token approvals, no off chain message signing, and no funds sent anywhere. One transaction from the holder's own wallet completes the process.

That specificity turns the claim flow itself into a scam filter. Anything asking for more than a single transaction from your own wallet is not The Sandbox. Token approval requests, signature prompts, and any instruction to send funds are all outside the legitimate process by definition.

The studio added that its team will never send a direct message first, and that all official information is published through its verified X account and at claim.sandbox.game. Anyone unsure whether a message or link is legitimate should verify against those two sources before taking any action.

Missing the Deadline Is Not Fatal

Holders who miss the September 22 cutoff do not lose their entitlement. The Sandbox has asked anyone in that position to contact [email protected] directly, with late claims accepted on a case by case basis through the end of October.

Questions about eligibility or the claim process itself go to [email protected].

The Incident Behind It

The compensation follows an exploit that began on Friday, August 21, 2026 at 23:41 UTC and was contained when the bridge was closed at contract level across all three chains on August 22 at 05:26 UTC.

The vulnerability sat in how SAND was deployed on Base and BNB Smart Chain, where the token contract also acted as the LayerZero bridge integration. A configuration function let the attacker register themselves as the sole verifier of incoming bridge messages, which allowed them to mint unbacked SAND on both networks without any corresponding deposit on Ethereum.

Forensic analysis put the drained amount at 14,742,341.84 SAND from the Ethereum vault backing the bridge, roughly 0.5 percent of the fixed 3 billion maximum supply, with an estimated value of approximately 697,000 USD. Total estimated economic impact came to around 1,496,784 USD.

SAND on Ethereum and Polygon was never affected, and Ethereum supply remains unchanged at exactly 3,000,000,000 tokens. Polygon uses a separate bridge that was not part of the compromised path.

All compensation is funded from The Sandbox treasury. No new SAND is being minted, so the supply figure stays where it is.

The contracts on Base and BNB Smart Chain are permanently retired and will not reopen, since they are not upgradeable and the configuration role can be retaken by anyone willing to pay gas. Bridging to those networks will only resume through newly deployed contracts at new addresses, which will be announced through official channels.

For anyone still holding unbacked SAND on those networks, the guidance has not changed. Those tokens cannot be moved to any other chain and cannot be redeemed, and any price quoted for them is not a real price.