WazirX, the major Indian crypto exchange suffered a security breach with $234 million drained in suspicious transactions.
Withdrawals suspended
WazirX officially confirmed the hack and told they’re temporarily suspended all withdrawals on the platform.
A little earlier, the blockchain security firm Cyvers Alerts reported that their system identified multiple suspicious transactions involving WazirX’s Safe Multisig wallet on the Ethereum network.
A total of $234.9 million was moved to a new address, with each transaction funded by Tornado Cash.
It’s gone
The suspicious wallet, identified as 0x04b2 already sold $7.6 million worth of PEPE and exchanged GALA and USDT for ETH. But this is not the whole loot.
Over $100 million in Shiba Inu tokens were withdrawn, along with $52 million in Ether, $11 million in Matic, and $6 million in Pepe. No doubt it’s an impressive amount of crypto.
Update:#WazirX has ~$230M in assets stolen. Including:
5.43T $SHIB($102M)
15,298 $ETH($52.5M)
20.5M $MATIC($11.24M)
640.27B $PEPE($7.6M)
5.79M $USDT
135M $GALA($3.5M)
…‼️Please note that the hacker is selling these assets!https://t.co/1uOozAVeM1 https://t.co/ogtVSFITK9 pic.twitter.com/3vPmxqXwbL
— Lookonchain (@lookonchain) July 18, 2024
I mean it’s terrible, but still impressive. The hacker begun selling these assets right after the attack.
CryptoQuant analyst Bradley Park mentioned that 5.4 trillion SHIB were taken from WazirX and this stack also could be sold for Ethereum at any moment.
Community impact
WazirX sharing their Proof of Reserve report time to time, and their latest shows the exchange held assets valued just above $502 million.
This hack is a big blow to the users and to the Indian crypto community, which is already facing regulatory problems from more direction.
Indian exchanges are struggling with low trading volumes due to the 1% tax deduction at source on each transaction, which was imposed by the government.
This caused many, based on some rumor, the majority of retail customers to use foreign exchanges to avoid these taxes.
The Financial Intelligence Unit of India in the past blocked URLs of several foreign crypto exchanges, including Binance, for not obeying to local anti-money laundering policies. This recent hack on WazirX doesn’t make the situation more simple, that’s sure.
