DEX LeetSwap halts trading amid suspected exploit

LeetSwap, a decentralized exchange on L2 Base network from Coinbase, said it was suspending operations amid concerns over a probable breach.

“Because our DEX is a fork of Solidly, the platform has a security-pause feature. We noticed that some pool liquidity could have been compromised, and we temporarily halted trading to investigate,” the project team said.

According to PeckShield, about 340 ETH (~$630,000) was withdrawn from some Base liquidity pools.

Trading halts were reported shortly after the Layer-2 network was swept by a wave of meme tokens. One asset — BALD — surged nearly 40,000% in a matter of days.

However, later the token’s developers pulled the majority of its liquidity from LeetSwap, withdrawing 7,000 ETH and 142 million BALD, after which its price fell to $0.015. On 1 August, the token jumped to $0.04, before retreating again to around $0.006.

According to DEX Screener, LeetSwap’s trading volume over the past 24 hours exceeded $115 million, and the number of transactions reached 480,455, about 40% of Base’s daily turnover.

In July, the Coinbase blockchain team opened access to the mainnet for application developers. The official mainnet launch is planned for August. The project is built on the OP Stack from Optimism and operates as an Ethereum-scale network of rollups.