Crypto exchange Bitmart hacked; Suffers loss of nearly $196 million

New Delhi: The latest centralised exchange hacks may be considered as one of the most devastating actions as Bitmart has lost around $196 million in various cryptocurrencies.

The alleged hack that happened on Saturday night gathered attention after security analysis firm Peckshield published a tweet. Currently, one of Bitmart’s addresses shows a stable outflow of entire token balances, some valued at tens of millions of dollars, to an address labelled by Etherscan as the “Bitmart Hacker.”

However, in a follow-up tweet Peckshield estimated that around $100 million in various cryptocurrencies on the Ethereum chain have been lost. The losses on Binance Smart Chain estimates to be $96 million.

Reportedly, the hackers have been using decentralised exchange aggregator 1inch to swap the stolen assets for the cryptocurrency ether. The hacker has also been using a secondary address to deposit the ETH into privacy mixer Tornado Cash which is making the hacked funds difficult to track.

In an official Telegram page, Bitmart representatives, in the beginning, claimed that the outflows were withdrawn routinely thus referring to the reports of the hack as “fake news.”

Interesting from @BitMartExchange …😳😳😳 🙏🙏🙏 https://t.co/dFrzSww0fs pic.twitter.com/GuDB7bt2eC

— PeckShield Inc. (@peckshield) December 5, 2021

After a few hours, Bitmart CEO Sheldon Xia asserted that the outflows were hacks that resulted in a “security breach.”

1/3 We have identified a large-scale security breach related to one of our ETH hot wallets and one of our BSC hot wallets. At this moment we are still concluding the possible methods used. The hackers were able to withdraw assets of the value of approximately USD 150 millions.

— Sheldon Xia (@sheldonbitmart) December 5, 2021

The centralised exchange hacks resulting in the loss of $196 million is one of the devastating hacks to date.