For the love of cheese, don't keep your crypto in exchanges.
Just don't. Don't do it.
This is a note to self as much as a PSA*.
* Even as I encouraged myself -- and you -- to transfer the scraps from faucets into exchange wallets, don't keep anything in there, at least, anything greater than you're willing to lose
Because, if you follow crypto news at all, you heard that KuCoin, who touts themselves as a pretty secure place to do business, got themselves haxxored this weekend. And folks lost a total of ~$150 million dollars, out of their KUCOIN hot wallets**, in total.
** It's a little unclear how many wallets. Some of what I'm seeing makes it sound like it was one or two whale sized wallets. I mean, not from my wallet, which on KuCoin, as about 8/10 of a cent in ETH, leftover as dust from a trade. Phew! LOL
KuCoin has said that currency in cold wallets wasn't touched***.
*** Remember, with wallets, hot means connected to a network or the intarwebs, while cold means...not actively connected
The good news is that KuCoin is going to (so it says in its statement) reimburse stolen assets "completely." Which is really awesome. Because, as you know, defi, by the de of its fi, is often uncovered -- or incompletely covered -- by insurance, and, by their nature, exchanges themselves will waive themselves of responsibility over your money...yanno, because in trading and exchange, loss is part of the game, and so on.
So, what did happen here? If you were paying attention, KuCoin devs first saw what they explained as some sort of system-wide outage. But, then:
It then became apparent that about $150 million worth of tokens had been moved to a different address. The address received transactions of 11,484 Ether, worth roughly $4 million, plus $146 million in transactions of other tokens. Many are little-known, such as Gladius, Chroma, Ocean Token, and Hawala, but there were also Maker, OMG, and YFI tokens in the mix. (decrypt.co)
Anyway, if you're curious about where funds went and what's being done, this KuCoin page is being updated frequently.
So, yeah. Go move yourself from hot to cold. Do it.
Let me know what you think below, or if you've heard more or different. Or say hi. Or both. Or something else.
