Fake Ethena Token Nets $290K on Binance Launchpool

A fake Ethena token resembling Ethena Labs’s ENA token was exploited for 480 BNB, worth around $290,000 on the Binance Launchpool.

Farmers on the Binance launch pool have acquired 480 BNB tokens worth $290,000 by using an illegitimate token with the same name as Ethena Labs’ ENA token which is a fake Ethena token.

The exploited vulnerability in this situation remains uncertain. The incident was reported by the on-chain security company PeckShield in an X post at 8:31 a.m. UTC on March 29.

Fake Ethena Token Misleads Investors

The company had mistaken the fake token for the genuine ENA token to report the incident. On March 29, Ethena Labs introduced the ENA coin to the Binance Launchpool.

The exploit of a fake token, unrelated to Ethena Labs, that occurred a few hours after the announcement listing, caused widespread confusion.

On February 19, Ethena Labs introduced its USD synthetic dollar on the public mainnet for the first time. On March 8, Ethena provided investors with an annual percentage yield (APY) of 67%, which resulted in it being the decentralized application (DApp) operating in the cryptocurrency industry with the most outstanding earnings.

Within crypto hacks, the exploit is on the lower end of the spectrum regarding the overall sum. A day after the hacking of Prisma Finance, which resulted in a loss of over $11 million, the attack took place.

Hacks in the cryptocurrency business have been a problem for a long time, and they are eroding investor trust. The blockchain security company Immunefi reported that as of February 29, hacks and rug pulls resulted in the theft of over two hundred million dollars worth of cryptocurrency in 2024.

Compared to the $173 million in digital assets taken in January and February of 2023, the loss of more than $200 million represents a 15.4% increase.

According to research that Immunefi published on December 28th, 2023, digital currency hackers and scammers were responsible for the loss of a total of $1.8 billion, with 17% of that amount being attributed to the North Korean Lazarus Group.

According to Chainalysis’s “2024 Crypto Crime Report,” 2022 was the most successful for crypto hackers, with over $3.7 billion in cash stolen. This figure dropped by 54.3% to $1.7 billion in 2023, making 2022 the most successful year for crypto hackers.

There was an increase in the number of occurrences from 219 in 2022 to 231 in 2023, even though the worth of funds decreased.

According to the research, Chainalysis ascribed the significant annual dip to a fall in the number of hacking efforts directed toward decentralized finance (DeFi) accounts: 

“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.”