Key Takeaways
An internal wallet compromise resulted in a $44.2 million cross-chain hack for Indian crypto exchange CoinDCX. The CEO confirmed user funds were safe, and all trading activity remained fully operational.
One of the largest crypto exchanges in India, CoinDCX, lost $44 million in a significant hack.
The hack occurred in the early hours of Saturday in India, and came after the $230 million exploit that took down the Indian exchange WazirX almost exactly a year ago.
Well-known blockchain sleuth ZachXBT was the first to identify the hack via a post on Telegram.
“Looks like the India centralized exchange ‘CoinDCX’ was likely drained for ~$44.2M almost 17 hours ago and has yet to disclose the incident to the community“.
Minutes after the investigator’s post, the CEO of CoinDCX, Sumit Gupta, confirmed the incident in a post on X.
“Today, one of our internal operational accounts – used only for liquidity provisioning on a partner exchange – was compromised due to a sophisticated server breach. I confirm that the CoinDCX wallets used to store customer assets are not impacted and are completely safe.”
He added,
“No customer funds have been impacted. Your assets remain completely safe and protected in our secure cold wallet infrastructure. All trading activity and INR withdrawals are fully operational.”
The hack came to light after blockchain security firm Cyvers flagged the stolen crypto due to the suspicious transactions. ZachXBT manually identified the affected wallet as belonging to CoinDCX. He wrote,
“The attacker address was funded with 1 ETH from Tornado Cash and later bridged a portion of the stolen funds from Solana to Ethereum.”
Crypto hackers have been active in recent weeks
On Wednesday, the 18th of June, Iranian crypto exchange Nobitex was hacked. The attack was a politically motivated one made by the pro-Israel hacker group that calls itself “Gonjeshke Darande.”
AMBCrypto reported that the hack was worth $81 million, and vanity addresses were used to taunt and exploit the platform’s vulnerabilities.
Another exchange operating on the Arbitrum blockchain called GMX V1 suffered an exploit on the 9th of July.
GMX V1, a version of the GMX protocol, was exploited for a reentrancy vulnerability, and the hacker captured $42 million.
Several days later, the hacker accepted a $5 million white hat bounty and returned $40 million of the stolen funds.
A Bitcoin DeFi platform on the Stacks blockchain, Alex Protocol, saw a $8.3 million loss in a hack on the 6th of June. It is one of the largest hacks on the Stacks blockchains to date.
The Alex Lab Foundation pledged to fully reimburse affected users using its treasury reserves.
