Ethena Labs exploited for $290k on Binance Launchpool

Ethena Labs fell victim to an exploit resulting in the loss of 480 BNB tokens valued at $290,000 on the Binance launch pool for farming. The specific vulnerability behind the exploit remains undisclosed. On-chain security firm PeckShield flagged the incident at 8:31 a.m. UTC on March 29, as reported in a post on X platform.

Prior to the exploit, Ethena Labs introduced its $ENA token to the Binance launchpool on March 29, allowing users to farm the token by staking BNB or FDUSD. Notably, Ethena Labs had recently launched its USDe synthetic dollar on the public mainnet on Feb. 19. The platform had gained significant traction, becoming the highest-earning decentralized application (DApp) in the crypto space on March 8, offering investors an annual percentage yield (APY) of 67%.

While the monetary impact of this exploit is relatively smaller compared to other crypto hacks, it occurred shortly after the Prisma Finance hack, which totaled over $11 million on March 28.

Crypto hacks continue to plague the industry, undermining investor confidence. According to blockchain security firm Immunefi, over $200 million worth of crypto has been lost to hacks and rug pulls in 2024 across 32 individual incidents as of Feb. 29. This represents a 15.4% increase compared to the same period in 2023, when $173 million in digital assets were stolen.

In 2023, a staggering $1.8 billion was lost to crypto hacks and scams, with 17% of the total attributed to the North Korean Lazarus Group, as per a Dec. 28 report by Immunefi.

It's worth noting that funds hacked in 2024 have seen a 15.4% increase compared to the same period in 2023, according to Immunefi.

This remains a developing story, and additional details will be provided as they become available.