TL;DR Breakdown:
- Liquid Exchange has reportedly lost over $80 million worth of assets to hackers.
- The exchange says its cold wallet wasn’t affected, and investigations are ongoing.
Institutional-grade cryptocurrency exchange, Liquid Global Exchange, has reportedly lost over $80 million worth of digital currencies, including Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH), in the latest security breach. The Japanese exchange confirmed the hack in a tweet on Thursday, saying its warm wallet was compromised.
Hacker Stole Over $80 Million Assets
According to Liquid Exchange, only the funds in the warm wallet were hacked. These reportedly include 107 Bitcoin (BTC), 11 million Ripple (XRP), 9 million Tron (TRX), Ether (ETH), and some other ERC-20 tokens. Although the exchange hasn’t disclosed the amount of assets lost, the total stolen cryptocurrency is estimated to be worth over $80 million.
There isn’t any disclosure yet on how the attacker was able to transfer the assets from the warm wallet. However, Liquid Exchange said it’s currently investigating the attack and will provide regular updates on its findings. In the meantime, Liquid Exchange has suspended deposits and withdrawals.
The remaining assets on the warm wallet have been moved to the cold wallet. Assets on cold wallets were not affected by the attack. The exchange also mentioned it’s working with other crypto exchanges to freeze and recover the stolen funds.
Already, KuCoin has been able to blacklist some of the addresses highlighted to be from the hacker.
Liquid once suffered an attack in 2018 that resulted in the exposure of its customers’ personal information.
Time to beef up security
The Liquid Exchange attack today is coming some days after the DeFi interoperability protocol Poly Network was hacked of $600 million worth of assets. Although the hacker has returned the funds, the incident was a shocking moment for some people, given the amount of money involved. It was termed the biggest “DeFi attack.”
