Decentralized Perpetual Market Level Finance Hacked for $1.1M

Another attack has hit the DeFi market, with BNB Chain-based decentralized and non-custodial perpetual market Level Finance the latest victim. On May 2, the team stated on Twitter that the exploited had targeted its smart contracts in order to drain the funds.

The attacker specifically targeted the Referral Controller Contract, draining 214,000 LVL tokens. The token was then exchanged for BNB tokens. Other smart contracts were unaffected since they were not affected by this attack.

The researchers also provided some solace by reporting that liquidity pools and the DAO treasury were untouched. At 12 hours, it also deployed a patch fairly quickly. The team also claimed that they would provide a post-mortem of the attack later, which should provide some insight into what transpired. DeFi assaults continue to plague the industry, and in certain cases, audits were insufficient to prevent them.

Level finance is a permanent market that is decentralized and non-custodial. The platform, which is built on BNB Chain, now has a TVL of $32.5 million. It had a TVL of around $41 million prior to the attack.

Level Finance claims to offer programmable pools of liquidity, efficient capital hedging, and risk management among other things. The network’s utility token, the LVL token, incentivizes adoption across the ecosystem.

The amount of hackers in 2023 is increasing, with additional attacks occurring in recent weeks. It’s still not as awful as it was in 2022, but it may all change with a single huge hack. In February, for example, hackers stole $20 million, which pales in comparison to 2022.

Euler Finance and Sentiment are two of the year’s most notable hacks. The former had $197 million taken, while the latter had $1 million stolen. Surprisingly, in both cases, the teams negotiated with the hackers to have the majority of the funds returned.