Bitrue Confirms $23 Million Crypto Theft After Hot Wallet Breach

The exchange has temporarily suspended all withdrawals until April 18 and promised to refund the affected users.

A hacker was able to access cryptocurrency exchange Bitrue and withdraw around $23 million in digital currency today. The company confirmed the breach in a Twitter thread posted today. Bitrue said that one of its hot wallets had been temporarily hacked earlier and that the team was working to resolve the issue.

“We have identified a brief exploit in one of our hot wallets on 07:18 (UTC), 14 April 2023. We were able to address this matter quickly and prevented the further exploit of funds. We take this matter seriously and are currently investigating the situation,” the company stated, adding that “the attackers were able to withdraw assets worth approximately 23 million USD in the following currencies: ETH, QNT, GALA, SHIB, HOT, and MATIC.”

1/4: We have identified a brief exploit in one of our hot wallets on 07:18 (UTC), 14 April 2023. We were able to address this matter quickly and prevented the further exploit of funds. We take this matter seriously and are currently investigating the situation. pic.twitter.com/QioPHSB2DM

— Bitrue (@BitrueOfficial) April 14, 2023

Twitter user “vooidds” first noticed that Bitrue’s wallet moved 320 Ethereum (ETH) to an unknown wallet 0x34D8. Later they shifted 318 ETH to the hacker’s wallet 0x1819. Besides, the hacker got 173,000 Quant (QNT), 172.55 billion Shiba Inu (SHIB), 46.4 million GALA, 756.15 million Holo (HOT), and 310,000 Polygon (MATIC). In total, they got over $23 million worth of assets, but slowly they sold all the QNT tokens in the public market. The hacker still has around $22 million worth of assets as of now.

Bitrue reported that the hacked wallet had less than 5% of total reserves and the rest of the wallet was safe. The exchange has temporarily stopped all withdrawals. It plans to resume withdrawals on April 18 and fully reimburse all users who are affected by the incident.

Bitrue handles over $1 billion in daily trading volume, according to CoinGecko data, with Bitcoin and Ether being among the most-traded token pairs.