Mercado Bitcoin has assured its customers that they will not lose any funds following the security incident that led it to suspend deposits and withdrawals on Monday.
The Brazilian crypto exchange has now put the value of the assets involved at around $38 million. In the meantime, it had already blocked $11 million in coordination with Tether, Circle, Paxos, BRL1 and Chainalysis.
Recovery efforts continue
In its latest update, Mercado Bitcoin said other amounts eligible for blocking have also been identified, and containment efforts continue. The statement follows an incident identified in one of the company’s systems in the early hours of Monday. The exchange has temporarily suspended access to services as a precaution to protect customer assets. He said services would resume once full safety conditions were in place.
The initial scale of the incident was reported by blockchain security firm Hypernative, which said more than $40 million was withdrawn from Mercado Bitcoin-linked wallets overnight. The company’s preliminary estimate covered transfers on at least 10 blockchains, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana and Tron. The exchange previously said that no customer data was disclosed.
The first suspicious transfer was recorded at 2:15 UTC, while the largest movements took place between 6:19 and 6:53 UTC, when wallets linked to the exchange sent funds to newly created addresses. The transactions appeared to be ordinary signed transfers, meaning they were sent as if the source wallets had authorized them. Hypernative said it is still unclear how the attacker obtained the ability to sign these transactions.
More exploits
The industry has had little room to maneuver, especially after the $6.3 billion Binance hack.
Meanwhile, ZachXBT reported another alleged theft involving over $133 million in withdrawals from centralized exchanges linked to an unnamed European entity. Blockchain investigator identified an additional $27 million in withdrawals made by the suspected illicit actor, resulting in takes the total rose from the previously reported $106 million to more than $133 million.
The funds were withdrawn in USDC and USDT before the attacker began swapping USDC for ETH, routing the transactions through instant exchanges such as WellWallet and Kyrrex, and converting the funds to the privacy-focused cryptocurrency XMR through Wagyu. The actor also pooled funds across multiple blockchains. ZachXBT expressed confidence that this activity was not linked to the North Korean Lazarus group, citing several indicators of money laundering.
He believes a major financial institution in Western Europe may have been exploited and suspects the incident is being covered up. ZachXBT also criticized the lack of proper disclosure of the incident, while claiming that more than $30 million had already been laundered and could have been frozen by EU law enforcement.
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