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Just hours after Ethena’s new ENA token debuted for farming on Binance, the platform was exploited, resulting in the loss of 480 BNB tokens valued at $290,000.
The specifics of the vulnerability behind the exploit remain elusive. PeckShield, an on-chain security firm, disclosed the incident in an X post at 8:31 am UTC on March 29.
Ethena Labs introduced its ENA token to the Binance Launchpool on March 29, shortly before the exploit occurred. This allowed users to farm the token by staking BNB or First Digital USD (FDUSD).
Notably, Ethena Labs had launched its USDe synthetic dollar on the public mainnet on February 19. By March 8, Ethena had emerged as the top-earning decentralized application (DApp) in the crypto sphere, offering investors an impressive annual percentage yield (APY) of 67%.
While the $290K exploit is significant, it pales in comparison to the over $11 million hack that targeted Prisma Finance just a day prior on March 28.
Crypto hacks continue to pose a persistent challenge in the industry, eroding 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 separate incidents as of February 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 total of $1.8 billion was lost to crypto hacks and scams, with 17% of this attributed to the North Korean Lazarus Group, as per a December 28 report by Immunefi.
Although the total amount of stolen crypto funds decreased by 54% in 2023 compared to the previous year, the number of incidents actually rose from 219 to 231, indicating that while the scale of exploits may be diminishing in terms of stolen value, their frequency is on the rise.
Chainalysis, in its “2024 Crypto Crime Report,” attributed the significant yearly drop to a reduction in decentralized finance (DeFi) hacking, stating:
“Hacks of DeFi protocols largely drove the huge increase in stolen crypto that we saw in 2021 and 2022, with cybercriminals stealing more than $3.1 billion in DeFi hacks last year. But this year, hackers stole just $1.1 billion from DeFi protocols. This amounts to a 63.7% drop in the total value stolen from DeFi platforms year-over-year.”
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