March 29, 09:50 am UTC Update: A fabricated token with the same name as Ethena Labs’ ENA token has been exploited, resulting in the loss of 480 BNB tokens valued at $290,000 on the Binance launch pool for farming.
The specific vulnerability that led to the exploit remains unidentified. On-chain security firm PeckShield reported the incident at 8:31 am UTC on March 29 in an X-post, mistakenly assuming the fake token to be the genuine ENA token.
Ethena Labs had just announced the ENA token on the Binance Launchpool on March 29. However, the exploit of the unrelated fake token occurred shortly after the announcement, causing widespread confusion.
Ethena Labs previously launched its USDe synthetic dollar on the public mainnet on February 19. On March 8, Ethena became the highest-earning decentralized application (DApp) in the crypto industry by offering investors an annual percentage yield (APY) of 67%.
Compared to other crypto hacks, this exploit falls on the smaller side in terms of the total amount involved. The attack took place a day after the Prisma Finance hack, which exceeded $11 million on March 28.
Crypto hacks have long been a concern in the industry, eroding investor confidence. According to blockchain security firm Immunefi, a total of $200 million in crypto has been lost to hacks and rug pulls across 32 incidents in 2024 as of February 29.
This figure represents a 15.4% increase compared to the combined losses of $173 million in January and February 2023.
Immunefi’s report from December 28 states that a total of $1.8 billion was lost to crypto hacks and scammers in 2023, with 17% attributed to the North Korean Lazarus Group.
Related:
Funds hacked in 2024 increased by 15.4% compared to the same period in 2023 — Immunefi
Amount of stolen crypto funds dropped by 54% in 2023
The year 2022 saw the highest amount of funds stolen, totaling over $3.7 billion. However, this number decreased by 54.3% to $1.7 billion in 2023, according to the “2024 Crypto Crime Report” by Chainalysis.
Despite the decrease in value, the number of incidents grew from 219 in 2022 to 231 in 2023.
Chainalysis attributes this significant annual drop to a decrease in decentralized finance (DeFi) hacking, as stated in the report.
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Marc Andreessen, Galaxy Digital, Accolade, back new $75 million crypto fund: Report