Cryptocurrency exchange Ascendex has lost $80 million in a hack. The exchange has already announced that the lost funds will be refunded.
Ascendex exchange loses $80 million
The Ascendex exchange, formerly known as BitMax, has suffered a $77.7 million loss after a hot wallet was compromised. On Twitter, Ascendex said:
“We have detected a number of anomalous transfers of ERC-20, BSC, and Polygon tokens from our hot wallet. The cold wallet is NOT affected. Investigation is ongoing. If a user’s funds are affected by the incident, they will be fully covered by AscendEX. “
The exchange did not provide details of the tokens that were maliciously removed. However, data analytics firm PeckShield presented initial estimates.
The company noted that the total loss is about $78 million, including $60 million on Ethereum (ETH), $9.2 million on the Binance Smart Chain (BSC), and $8.5 million on Polygon (MATIC). PeckShield also provided a full list of the hacker’s haul.
Estimated loss @AscendEX_Global: $77.7M in total ($60M on @ethereum $9.2M @BinanceChain $8.5M @0xPolygon). Here is the list of the transferred-out assets and their amounts on @ethereum pic.twitter.com/VC4DKOwu4f
– PeckShield Inc. (@peckshield) December 12, 2021
Weeks go on and on
Last week, the BitMart exchange lost $200 million in a hack. The attacker had managed to steal $33.4 million from Shiba Inu (SHIBA) and $43.8 million from SAFEMOON. While BitMart CEO Sheldon Xia confirmed the losses on Twitter, he announced a temporary halt to all withdrawals and deposits. The investigation is still ongoing.
The attacker had used the decentralised exchange (DEX) 1Inch to convert all the tokens into Ether. The ETH were then sent to the Tornado Cash blender which will make it more difficult to track them. The diagram below traces the operations
Diagram of the transfer of funds after the hack (Source: PeckShield)
Peckshield noted that it was a simple game for the pirates, one in which they “transfer, trade and wash”.
