Dear Readers,
We have happened to read various security breach issues with the centralized crypto exchanges around the world.
By yesterday, there was a news that the India's top Crypto Exchange WazirX was hacked and over $230 million worth of cryptos were stolen from one of its crypto wallets.
We have recently come across the return of BTCs of Mt Gox Exchange which was experienced a hack in 2011 to a tune of $8.75 million- which made a turmoil in the crypto market!
In terms of valuation compared to the Mt Gox, the present WazirX hack is 25 times higher- in terms of the stolen asset value.
WazirX took on the twitter to intimate this information in its X Platform handle.
For everyone's understanding the Multisig Wallets which is known as multi-signature wallet a cryptocurrency wallet that requires two or more signatures ( private keys) to confirm and make a transaction.
On the wake of the above incident and to ensure the safety of the investors assets, all the INR ( Fiat Currency to transfer to the bank) and Crypto Withdraws have temporarily been paused in the WazirX exchange.
Later, WazirX has stated in its blog that the following was the outcome of the preliminary findings on the incident:
This is a force majeure event beyond our control, but we are leaving no stone unturned to locate and recover the funds. We have already blocked a few deposits and reached out to concerned wallets for recovery. We are in touch with the best resources to help us in this endeavor.
It also further stated that this attacked crypto wallet of WazirX was operated utilising the services of Liminal’s Digital Asset custody and wallet infrastructure from February 2023. There were six signatories for this- Five from our WazirX team and one from Liminal.
WazirX also came up and mentioned that the affected wallet Address is 0x27fD43BABfbe83a81d14665b1a6fB8030A60C9b4
Please refer to the link of the WazirX blogspot to read more on this in detail.
About WazirX
WazirX is one of the most popular and the largest cryptocurrency exchange platform in India, founded in 2018 by Nischal Shetty, Sameer Hanumanthu, and Siddharth Menon. It also hit the headlines last year over the tug of word war between Binance and WazirX. There were news in 2019 that Binance has acquired Wazirx but later it has been clarified that the acquisition was only on agreement for some purchases.
It is to be noted that with the WazirX used the Binance Wallets. With the controversies with Binance, Wazirx transferred all its crypto possessions from Binance Wallets the multisig wallets in 2023.
Binance which confirmed acquiring WazirX in 2019, but later updated its statement in August 2022 that the acquisition was only an agreement for purchases.
WazirX has its own crypto token (WRX) to trade with. Currently it is trading at $0.1425. It faced a more than 14% fall in the past 24 hours. It has ranked at 524.
Details of the Stolen Cryptos
According to third party blockchain analytics tool, Lookonchain, the stolen assets from WazirX included $102 million of Shiba Inu ( Ranked at 13, Shiba Inu currently trading at $0.00001724 ) $52.5 million in Ethereum (Ranked at 2, ETH currently trading at $3,429.65) , $11.24 million in Matic ( Ranked at , $7.6 million in Pepe coin (Ranked at 22 and currently trading at $0.00001156), $135 million in Tether( The Stable Coin USDC, ranked at 3 and currently trading at $0.9999), and $3.5 million in Gala ( Ranked at 88 and currently trading at $0.02362).
The earlier incidents of hacks in the Crypto Exchanges:
This is not the first time that we have come across the security breach on centralised crypto exchanges. Mt. Gox, Kucoin, Upbit, Binance, Bitfinex, Cryptopia, Zaif, Bancor, Coincheck, Coinbene were experienced the similar hack attacks and the cryptos were stolen from the exchanges in the past.
(See the detailed article on this in the link provided in the resources )
The alarm of Safety:
This hack once again created panic bell among the investors community and the uncertainty on the security of the crypto custody in the wallets. We also need various means to protect our hard earned crypto assets to be much safer.
Once again the need and importance for the hardware crypto wallets which have private keys in offline mode would be a safer option that is a option to evade from the online hacking efforts.
And we also understand the risks of hacking when we are using the wallets of the centralised crypto exchanges as well.
