Decentralized finance (DeFi) has been in the news in recent months because of the repeated hacks it has suffered. However, centralized players are not immune to this. A sad reality that has just caught up with Exchange Liquid.
91 million dollars stolen
On Thursday, August 19, the Japanese exchange platform Liquid Global informed its users that a breach had led to the loss of tens of millions of dollars.
In addition to its announcement, Liquid provided the hacker’s various identified addresses across the Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tron and Ripple networks. In fact, the attacker managed to access several of their hot wallets, causing the loss of $91 million in cryptocurrencies. Still, it should be noted that no cold wallet was impacted by this attack.
At the time of writing, the various wallets identified as belonging to the attacker have :
- 107 BTC, or $5 million;
- 11,937 ETH, or $38 million;
- 68 ERC-20s with a total of $24 million;
- 2,600,933 TRX, or $226,000;
- 11,508,516 XRP, or $14 million.
The entire list of stolen assets can be found in the latest report published by Liquid.
Although the BTC and ETH wallets have remained as they are for the time being, funds held on Tron and Ripple have already been moved to other wallets, suggesting that the attacker has already started laundering the funds. At the same time, $16 million in ERC-20 could be saved after their issuers froze them.
Celsius in danger?
Following the attack, some reports, whose information could not be confirmed at the time, claimed that the attacked wallets held funds belonging to users of the Celsius project. As a reminder, last April, the Celsius savings and lending protocol had announced a partnership with the Liquid exchange platform to allow their users to enjoy compound interest on their deposits.
Fortunately for Celsius users, the report published by Liquid invalidates this information, stating that its Liquid Earn service was not impacted by the attack.
To date, Liquid has not mentioned any compensation plan for the stolen funds. Hopefully, for its users, the platform had insurance covering its hot wallets.
Recently, the DeFi ecosystem also experienced a major hack with the Poly-Network protocol attack. In total, $600 million in cryptocurrencies were stolen, before being returned by the attacker. Since then, the protocol is considering hiring the hacker, considered a white hat, to ensure the security of the protocol.
