  We study extremal black holes, their ADM mass and area of the horizon in N =
8 supergravity. Contrary to intuition gained from N = 2, 4 theories, in N = 8
supergravity BPS states may become massless only at the boundary of moduli
space. We show that stringy states described in [1], which have no mass gap and
survive in the toroidal compactification in addition to massless states of
perturbative N = 8 supergravity, display a null singularity in four-dimensional
space-time, when viewed as solutions of N = 8 Einstein equations. We analyze
known methods of resolving such singularities and explain why they do not work
in D=4, N = 8 supergravity. We discuss possible implications for the issue of
UV finiteness of the four-dimensional N = 8 perturbation theory.
