Swap Cryptocurrencies BitMart reported late Saturday that it had been hacked and that $150 million worth of cryptocurrency had been stolen.
PeckShield, a security firm, first believed that $100 million had been stolen from the exchange.
Sheldon Xia, founder and CEO, later acknowledged the situation via Twitter: “An extensive security breach involving two of our ETH and BSC hot wallets has been discovered. We haven’t yet nailed down all of the potential approaches yet. It is estimated that the hackers stole USD $150 million worth of assets.”
At 7:30 PM UTC, PeckShield discovered an abnormally high volume of outgoing transfers. It discovered that beginning at 4:30 PM EST, a variety of tokens had been transferred out of BitMart’s hot wallet. Among these tokens were millions of dollars’ worth of the stablecoin USDC and hundreds of thousands of meme tokens like shiba (SHIB).
It has been pointed out by some commentators that monies may have also been stolen from the Binance Smart Chain blockchain.
Tornado Cash, an Ethereum mixing service, has now received the payments, making it more difficult to trace their origin.
