Lympo NFT Platform Hacked for $18.7 Million, LMT Token Down 99%

Animoca Brands subsidiary Lympo has suffered a breach that cost the minter of sports non-fungible tokens (NFTs) close to US$19 million worth of its native token, LMT.

Hackers broke into Lympo’s systems on January 10 and drained 165.2 million LMT, worth US$18.7 million at the time. Since then, the value of the token has plunged 92 percent, though blockchain security company PeckShield claims it could be more than 99 percent:

According to a post from the Lympo team, 10 different project wallets were compromised in the attack. Most of the stolen tokens were sent to a single address, exchanged for Ether on Uniswap and SushiSwap, then diverted elsewhere.

Liquidity Removed to ‘Minimise Price Disruption’

In a later tweet, the team also stated that it had removed liquidity LMT from liquidity pools to “minimise disruption to token prices”:

Removing liquidity from pools means traders will be unable to buy or sell any significant amount of the tokens without experiencing a dramatic loss of value on their trade.

Lympo advised traders that most of the LMT reserve sits in so-called cold wallets that are disconnected from the internet. These were unaffected by the attack.

We are investigating the incident and how we can make up for it for our community. At this point, we recommend not buying or selling additional LMT tokens.

Lympo post on Twitter

Second Hot Wallet Hack in a Week

Lympo is a subsidiary of Animoca Brands, a Hong Kong-based game software and venture capital company. According to Animoca CEO Yat Siu, “We are working with Lympo to assist them on a recovery plan, but we don’t have any specific mechanisms.”

This was the second hot wallet hack in a week, with crypto exchange LCX losing nearly US$8 million on January 8. Both incidents follow the US$200 million BitMart hack in early December.