In the early hours of Friday to Saturday, cryptocurrency broker Kucoin had its hotwallet emptied in several crypto. The incident is being closely monitored and is one of the biggest thefts involving a bitcoin broker.
Kucoin Live Hack
Kucoin's clients saw the hack happen live, while the broker's wallet was emptied, the Twitter account Whale Alert showed the huge sums moving on the blockchain:
“I'm hearing from a lot of people who can't get out of #Kucoin anymore. Anyone else having these problems? I am also realizing that large amounts of money are coming out of Kucoin's wallets”, Said the user BrandNew.
At address 0xeB31973E0FeBF3e3D7058234a5eBbAe1aB4B8c23 of the Ethereum network there are US $ 150 million in assets. Even blocking withdrawals, the hack continues and there are less than 2 hours from when we published this article there were transfers from the hotwallet in SXP and TOMO:
It is estimated that the broker has lost approximately $ 200 million in the hack.
The hotwallet is a wallet that goes online and the broker uses it to make the necessary transfers and withdrawals. Generally, the hotwallet has only a fraction of the exchange's funds. Much of the funds are in coldwallets (offline wallets).
Reply from Kucoin
Johnny Lyu, CEO of the brokerage, did a live this morning talking about the hack:
(embed) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRzL0kdUnME (/ embed)
Bitfinex exchanges managed to freeze US $ 13 million in USDt in time as a precautionary measure and the Akropolis project paused all transfers of the $ AKRO token.
(Matter under construction)
