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Level Finance, a BNB Chain-based decentralized and non-custodial perpetual market, suffered a hack on May 2. The attacker managed to steal $1.1 million in LVL tokens.
The DeFi market has been hit with yet another attack, with BNB Chain-based decentralized and non-custodial perpetual market Level Finance the next victim. The team announced on Twitter on May 2 that the exploited had targeted its smart contracts to siphon the funds.
Specifically, the attacker targeted the Referral Controller Contract, draining 214,000 LVL tokens. They then swapped the token for BNB tokens. Other smart contracts were unaffected, as they were isolated from this exploit.
What Is Level Finance?
The team also offered slight comfort revealing that liquidity pools and the DAO treasury were both unaffected. It has also deployed a patch rather quickly at 12 hours in.
The team also stated that they would offer a post-mortem of the attack later, which will hopefully offer some insight into what exactly happened. DeFi attacks continue to haunt the market, and in some cases, even audits weren’t enough to stop them from happening.
Level finance is a decentralized and non-custodial perpetual market. Built on BNB Chain, the platform currently has a TVL of $32.5 million. Before the hack, it had a TVL of about $41 million.
Among the features that Level Finance states that it provides are programmatic pools of liquidity, efficiency hedging of capital, and risk management. The LVL token is the network’s utility token, incentivizing use across the ecosystem.
DeFi Hacks in 2023 on the Rise
The number of hacks in 2023 is going up, with other attacks taking place in recent weeks. It’s still not as bad as in 2022, but that could change quickly with a single large hack. For example, hackers stole $20 million in February, which pales in comparison to 2022.
The most significant hacks of the year include Euler Finance and Sentiment. The former saw $197 million stolen, while in the latter’s case, it was $1 million. Interestingly, the teams negotiated with the hackers in both cases to have most of the funds returned.