$700,000 drained from BNB Chain-based DeFi protocol LaunchZone

BNB Chain-based DeFi protocol LaunchZone claims an exploit led to $700,000 of funds being drained from its liquidity pool, with its native token plunging in value.

$700,000 worth of funds has been drained from BNB Chain-based decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol LaunchZone, with the project alleging an attacker carried out an exploit.

Details remain scarce after more than 80% of funds in the LaunchZone liquidity pool were drained on Feb. 27. A message on the project’s official Telegram group warned users not to buy tokens until more information has been gathered:

“$LZ is being hacked from DND exploiter. The team is handling the situation, please don’t buy the token at this stage. Please keep calm. We will update timely (sic).”

The value of its native token LaunchZone (LZ) dropped by over 80% as funds were swapped out through PancakeSwap, according to blockchain data from several different blockchain explorers.

LaunchZone has over 44,000 members on its Telegram channel and some 275,000 followers on Twitter. The project has not made any warnings or announcements to its large Twitter following. It’s Facebook page is yet to respond to requests for comment from Cointelegraph.

The BNB Chain ecosystem has grappled with hacks and exploits over the past year. The BNB Chain fell prey to a $100 million exploit in October 2022, resulting in a hard fork. Attackers had taken advantage of a cross-chain exploit.

Web3 infrastructure firm Jump Crypto also identified and disclosed a critical vulnerability to the BNB Chain team in February. The exploit could have allowed an attacker to mint an unlimited amount of tokens via malicious transfers. The BNB team patched the vulnerability before it was disclosed to the wider public.

This is a developing story, and further information will be added as it becomes available.