The second major robbery in 10 days! Japanese cryptocurrency exchange lost nearly $100 million in theft

According to blockchain analysis firm Elliptic, hackers may have stolen approximately $97 million worth of cryptocurrency.

Japanese cryptocurrency exchange Liquid announced that it had been hacked. Although the company did not disclose the specific amount of loss, according to blockchain analysis company Elliptic, hackers may have stolen cryptocurrencies worth about $97 million.

Liquid said in a statement that its operations and technical teams "detected unauthorized access to some crypto wallets managed at Liquid" and subsequently discovered that "approximately $91.35 million in crypto assets were moved from Liquid wallets by an unauthorized party." Thanks to the help of the crypto community and other exchanges, $16.13 million worth of ERC-20 assets have been frozen.

The company urged its users not to deposit any crypto assets into its liquid wallets and said it had stopped all cryptocurrency withdrawals:

“We are sad to announce that Liquid’s hot wallet was compromised and we are in the process of moving assets to cold storage.”

(Cold wallets, also known as offline wallets, cannot access user private keys online; hot wallets are the opposite of cold wallets, also known as online wallets, which can access user private keys. Because they can connect to the Internet, hackers may be able to obtain private keys through the Internet.)

Currently, the company is working with other exchanges to track the flow of cryptocurrencies, freeze the stolen funds and return them to customers. Liquid said the hackers transferred the funds to the following addresses, including:

• Bitcoin: 1Fx1bhbCwp5LU2gHxfRNiSHi1QSHwZLf7q;

• Ethereum: 0x5578840aae68682a9779623fa9e8714802b59946;

• TRON: TSpcue3bDfZNTP1CutrRrDxRPeEvWhuXbp;

• Ripple: rfapBqj7rUkGju7oHTwBwhEyXgwkEM4yby.

The company said it is still evaluating how the attack occurred and will continue to provide updates as they become available. The company will continue to do everything it can to mitigate the impact of the incident and restore full service as soon as possible.

Liquid is one of the top 20 cryptocurrency exchanges in the world by daily trading volume, having processed more than $133 million in trades in the past 24 hours, according to CoinMarketCap.

This is the second major cryptocurrency theft in just over a week. On Aug. 10, hackers stole more than $600 million worth of digital tokens from so-called decentralized finance firm Poly Network, but later returned the assets.