Brazil’s Largest Crypto Exchange Goes Offline After $49,000,000 Hack

Brazil’s largest crypto exchange has taken its platform offline after a security incident involving about $49 million in crypto assets.

Mercado Bitcoin says no clients lost money and no data leaked, and that it has already blocked $11.2 million of the assets with help from partners including Tether, Circle, BRL1, Paxos and Chainalysis, reports Valor Econômico.

Says the exchange in a post on X,

“We identified and swiftly contained a security incident in one of our systems early this morning.”

The exchange first paused deposits and withdrawals while its teams investigate, track the assets and work with authorities.

It later shared the destination wallet addresses tied to the incident on EVM networks, Bitcoin, Solana, Stellar and Tron so they could be tracked.

Blockchain data firm Arkham says the attacker drained about $46.3 million worth of crypto assets from the platform.

Security firm Hypernative had earlier flagged about $40 million in outflows from wallets it attributes to the exchange.

Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino says the stablecoin issuer has frozen more than 4.5 million USDT linked to the incident.

Mercado Bitcoin says it is keeping the platform offline until it can safely restart and will share a timeline on its official channels.

It is also warning customers to watch out for scams, saying it never asks for passwords, verification codes or recovery phrases.