LaunchZone (LZ) price plunges 82% after a $700K exploit

Little-known BNB Chain-based decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol LaunchZone has been exploited and $700,000 worth of funds stolen. The news has sent the protocol’s native token, LZ, plunging by more than 82% at press time.

According to sources, the funds were drained from LaunchZone’s liquidity pool.

80% of funds stolen

Although details remain scarce, reports show that more than 80% of funds in the LaunchZone liquidity pool were drained on February 27.

LaunchZone has since issued a message in its official Telegram group warning users to avoid buying tokens until the platform gathers more information on the exploit. LaunchZone has more than 44,000 members on its Telegram channel.

The message read:

“$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 platform has about 275K followers on Twitter but it has not yet made any official announcement about the exploit on Twitter.

The stolen funds were reportedly swapped out using PancakeSwap (CAKE/USD)  according to data from several blockchain explorers.

BNB exploits in the past year

The BNB Chain (BNB/USD) has been a victim of several exploits and hacks in the past year with the latest one being a $100 million cross-chain exploit in October 2022 that resulted in a hard fork.

In early February 2023, Web3 infrastructure firm Jump Crypto identified and revealed a critical BNB Chain vulnerability to the BNB Chain team which patched it up before a catastrophe struck. The vulnerability allowed attackers to mint an unlimited amount of tokens via malicious transfers.

Source: https://invezz.com/news/2023/02/27/launchzone-lz-price-plunges-82-after-a-700k-exploit/