News

Crypto exchange CoinEx reportedly hacked as ETH, Polygon wallets lose millions

On 12 September, crypto exchange CoinEx reportedly fell victim to a hack. While the company didn’t make an official statement about the same, as per Colin Wu, the exchange lost almost $27 million.

Published

on

Source: Unsplash

  • A reported hack resulted in CoinEx losing millions in ETH, MATIC, and TRON
  • The crypto exchange has not made an official announcement on the incident but has gone under wallet maintenance

Crypto exchange – CoinEx – reportedly fell victim to a hack, with its Ethereum [ETH], TRON [TRX], and Polygon [MATIC] wallets affected. According to Chinese reporter – Colin Wu – the exchange has lost over $27 million to the hack. Even PeckShield – a blockchain analytics company – raised the alarms on the “suspicious outflow of large funds” from the exchange’s hot wallet.


Is your portfolio green? Check out the ETH Profit Calculator


Additionally, since the incident surfaced, CoinEx started to move its remaining crypto assets from its hot wallet to its cold wallet. As per Wu, the cold wallet holds $89 million in assets, with ETH and USDT accounting for $51.7 million and $18.23 million respectively.

CoinEx goes under maintenance

As of press time, CoinEx didn’t release any official statement regarding a hack or speculations on the reason for the massive outflows. However, it announced to its customers that it will start wallet maintenance. This is scheduled to take place from 23:18:30 (UTC+8) on 12th September, which effectively suspends deposit and withdrawal services.

Moreover, the hack of over $27 million in ETH, MATIC, and TRON does not seem to have had any impact on their prices. The coins have shown little to no change in the past hour, according to CoinMarketCap. Meanwhile, they were all painted in green in the 24-hour chart, with TRON showing the highest gain with over 5% increase.

Crypto hacks taking over the market?

Notably, CoinEx is not the only crypto firm to have a hack next to its name in the headlines. The past few days have seen multiple hacks taking over the market. This even includes the hack of the X, formerly Twitter, account of Vitalik Buterin – the creator of the second largest crypto, Ethereum [ETH]. This event even had the price of ETH taking a dip.

The incident was noticed after the account announced the launch of ConsenSys’ commemorative non-fungible tokens [NFTs]. Additionally, this announcement included a malicious link, urging users to link it to their wallets to mint the NFTs.

This incident has resulted in hackers taking home over $690K. And, it was later confirmed that the hack was a result of a SIM Swap attack. Buterin regained control over his X account after regaining his T-mobile account.