The founder and chief executive of BitMart is revealing that the global crypto exchange suffered a massive breach in security that enabled hackers to steal hundreds of millions of dollars worth of digital assets.
Sheldon Xia confirms the attack via Twitter and says hackers were able to access two of the exchange’s hot wallets, which are crypto wallets connected to the internet.
“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 $150 million.”
Xia adds that BitMart will use its own money to pay for customer losses due to the attack.
“BitMart will use our own funding to cover the incident and compensate affected users. We are also talking to multiple project teams to confirm the most reasonable solutions such as token swaps. No user assets will be harmed… In terms of asset deposits and withdrawals, we are confident that deposit and withdrawal functions will gradually begin on December 7th, 2021. The detailed timelines will be announced very soon.”
The hack, which was identified by blockchain security firm PeckShield, saw the bad actors stealing a plethora of altcoins including meme coin Shiba Inu (SHIB), as well as metaverse tokens The Sandbox (SAND), Decentraland (MANA), Gala and Enjin Coin (ENJ).
According to PeckShield, the hackers stole more than 893 billion Shiba Inu tokens worth $31.5 million at time of writing.
According to Xia, the amount of stolen tokens represents a small percentage of BitMart’s overall assets, and no other wallets were affected.
