On March 28, 2023, SafeMoon suffered an $8.9 million exploit via a publicly-accessible burn function left unprotected after an upgrade. The attacker destroyed SFM tokens to inflate their value, deposited, and withdrew disproportionate BNB. The attacker returned 80% of the funds ($7.2M) on April 20, keeping 20% as a claimed bug bounty.

Safemoon, a DeFi protocol based on the BNB chain, was attacked, and its liquidity pool lost nearly $8.9 million. Safemoon CEO John Karony said on Twitter: "This security incident affected the SFM:BNB LP pool and other LP pools on DEX were not affected. We have located the suspected vulnerability and fixed it. " According to analysis, the recent update may have introduced a "public destruction vulnerability", which facilitated hacker attacks. The hacker was able to use code functionality to artificially inflate the price of SFM tokens, then sell enough tokens back to the liquidity pool in the same transaction, effectively draining WBNB from the contract. On April 20, the SafeMoon attacker returned 80% of the stolen funds, that is, transferred 21,804 BNB (approximately $7.2 million) to the SafeMoon vault wallet, leaving the remaining 20% as a bounty.