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

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$700,000 worth of funds has been drained from BNB Chain DeFi protocol LaunchZone, with the project alleging that an attacker has 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 projects 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 LaunchZones native token $LZ dropped by over 80% as funds were swapped out through PancakeSwap as per blockchain data from a number of 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 and 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 itself fell prey to a $100 million exploit in October 2022 that resulted 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 2023. 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.