Bitmart loses $150m in large-scale hack

Crypto exchange Bitmart lost $150 million worth of assets on Sunday in what it described as a large-scale security breach.

The company revealed that the hack was related to one if its ETH hot wallets and one of its BSC hot wallets.

In a tweet, Bitmart’s founder and chief executive Sheldon Xia assured customers that the wallets carry a small percentage of assets on its exchange and that all other wallets are secure and unharmed.

On Monday, a day after the incident, Xia tweeted that Bitmart had completed initial security checks and identified that the security breach was mainly caused by a stolen private key that compromised the two wallets.

“BitMart will use our own funding to cover the incident and compensate affected users,” said the chief exec in a tweet. “We are also talking to multiple project teams to confirm the most reasonable solutions such as token swaps. No user assets will be harmed.”

The company has temporarily suspended withdrawals.

Xia said the business is confident that deposit and withdrawal functions will gradually return from Tuesday 7 December.

Bitmart is not the first cryptocurrency exchange that has lost millions in recent months.

In August, Liquid was hit with a cyberattack that cost the exchange over $94 million.

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