BitMart losses were estimated at around $196 million after a reported hot wallet security breach.
The most recent centralized exchange hack might be among the most damaging to date, as BitMart lost around $196 million in different cryptocurrencies.
A tweet from security research firm PeckShield first pointed out the reported hack Saturday night. One of BitMart's addresses at that time showed continuous outflows of entire token balances, some worth millions of dollars, to an address marked by Etherscan as the "BitMart Hacker."
In a follow-up tweet, PeckShield estimated the losses to be $100 million in different cryptocurrencies on the Ethereum chain and $96 million on Binance Smart Chain.
The hacker had been using decentralized exchange aggregator 1inch to swap the stolen assets for the cryptocurrency ether (ETH), and using a secondary address to deposit the ETH into privacy mixer Tornado Cash, making the hacked funds harder to trace.
In an official Telegram channel, BitMart representatives initially claimed that the outflows were normal withdrawals, referring to the reports of the hack as "fake news."
Interesting from @BitMartExchange ...😳😳😳 🙏🙏🙏 https://t.co/dFrzSww0fs pic.twitter.com/GuDB7bt2eC
— PeckShield Inc. (@peckshield) December 5, 2021
Hours later, however, BitMart CEO Sheldon Xia confirmed that the outflows were indeed a hack caused by a "security breach."
The $196 million in losses made this one of the most damaging centralized exchange hacks to date.