Crypto token launchpad Team Finance has been hacked and online thieves have made away with $14.5 million. They reportedly took advantage of a smart contract bug in the protocol's mitigation feature.

Team Finance has asked the people or person behind the attack to contact its team for a bounty. A bounty is a reward, usually a percentage of the amount involved, given to a hacker for pointing out the vulnerabilities in the protocol's infrastructure.

"We have just been alerted of an exploit on Team Finance. We are currently unsure of the details. We urge the exploiter to get in contact with us for a bounty payment. We are working to analyze and remedy the situation at this very moment," the crypto launchpad tweeted Thursday.

Team Finance confirmed that a bug in the migration function was the cause of the exploit. The platform has temporarily paused its services.

"$14.5M USD of tokens were exploited through the audited v2 to v3 migration function.We have temporarily paused all activity through team finance until we are certain this exploit has been remedied. All funds currently on Team Finance are not at further risk of this exploit," said Team Finance.

All the other features, including withdrawals and reward claims, are working properly, noted Team Finance. The exploiters' wallet address has been blacklisted by the crypto launchpad with the support of EtherScan. It also alerted crypto exchanges as the hackers might try to sell the funds.

October has seen a plethora of blockchain and crypto hacks, including the recent exploits targeting decentralized finance (DeFi) lending platform Moola Market, BitBTC Bridge's cross-chain bridge on Optimism and Solana-based decentralized exchange Mango Markets.

According to blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis, October was the worst month for crypto sector.

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