Bitmart Reportedly Loses Nearly $200 Million in Massive Hack The cryptocurrency trading platform is suspending withdrawals until further notice.
Amid the news of Bitcoin's price plunge on Saturday, crypto investors are faced with more bad news. Over the weekend, a hacker reportedly took $196 million from cryptocurrency trading platform Bitmart. According to Coindesk, the theft is "one of the most devastating centralized exchange hacks to date."
Related: Explore the Wealth Opportunities of NFT and Cryptocurrency
"We have identified a large-scale security breach related to one of our ETH hot wallets and one of our BSC hot wallets today," BitMart wrote in a statement. "At this moment we are still concluding the possible methods used. Hackers were able to withdraw assets of the value of approximately 150 million USD."
However, third-party security platform PeckShield estimates the loss is closer to $200 million. The company tracked the losses to be about $100 million in various cryptocurrencies on the Ethereum blockchain and $96 million on Binance Smart Chain.
Total estimated loss: ~200M (~100M on @ethereum and ~96M on @BinanceChain ). (Previously we only counted the loss on @ethereum). And here is the list of affected assets/amounts on @BinanceChain pic.twitter.com/cXXApDFtd7
— PeckShield Inc. (@peckshield) December 5, 2021
Bitmart wrote that the affected ETH hot wallets and BSC hot wallets carry only a small percentage of assets on BitMart, and all other wallets are secure and unharmed. Until further notice, the platform is suspending withdrawals.
According to Coindesk, identifying the individuals behind the theft may be difficult due to the process they used to steal the cryptocurrency.
Related: 8 Benefits of Blockchain to Industries Beyond Cryptocurrency
