Bitcoin, Shiba Inu Trade at Steep Discount on WazirX after Hack
The Bitcoin/Rupee trading pair on WazirX has dropped 22% in the past 24 hours, significantly more than on other local exchanges like CoinDCX and Zebpay, where prices fell by 2%. This highlights signs of immense selling pressure and poor liquidity on the exchange.
After a major hack of Indian crypto exchange WazirX on Thursday, the price of stolen altcoins like Shiba Inu came crashing down. However, it turns out that Bitcoin and other altcoins were also trading at a steep discount on Friday, July 19.
On Friday, almost all of the tokens on WazirX traded at a steep discount to their global prices highlighting signs of immense selling pressure and poor liquidity on the exchange.
Photo: WazirX
The Bitcoin/Rupee trading pair has dropped 22% in the past 24 hours, significantly more than on other local exchanges like CoinDCX and Zebpay, where prices fell by 2%. The Shiba Inu/Rupee pair has also declined by 30%. WazirX’s WRX token is down 40% in the past 24 hours. However, trading volumes on the exchange surged to $8 million, up from $2.2 million on Wednesday.WazirX faced a major security breach in one of its multisig wallets leading to more than $200 million worth of stolen funds from the exchange. Of them, the hacker stole more than $100 million worth of Shiba Inu and nearly $52 million worth of Ether. In fact, the on-chain data shows that WazirX has converted a lot of these altcoins to Ethereum, just ahead of the ETF launch scheduled four days from now.
The stolen funds represented over 45% of the total reserves reported by the exchange in June 2024, significantly diminishing users’ hopes for recovery. It attributed the exploit to a “mismatch” between a digital interface and a major crypto wallet, which occurred despite having five WazirX signers on the wallet that stored user assets. In a post on X, the exchange wrote:
“During the cyber attack, there was a mismatch between the information displayed on Liminal’s interface and what was actually signed. We suspect the payload was replaced to transfer wallet control to an attacker.”
North Korean Hackers behind WazirX Hack
In their latest report, blockchain analytics firm Elliptic stated that the North Korean hackers belonging to the notorious Lazarus Group were behind this hack. Another analyst ZachXBT noted that the “WazirX hack has the potential markings of a Lazarus Group attack”.
2/ The theft address I will start from is 0x6ee which was doing test transactions on July 10th from 0x09b multisig with SHIB and was funded with 6 X 0.1 ETH from Tornado.
0x6eedf92fb92dd68a270c3205e96dccc527728066
A technical breakdown of the attack by Mudit can be found below https://t.co/Q86k8o7oBg pic.twitter.com/JeU66hyOkI
— ZachXBT (@zachxbt) July 18, 2024
According to an investigation by ZachXBT shared on X, the stolen assets were moved to an address funded by Tornado Cash – a service frequently used to obscure the origins of cryptocurrency funds – after the hack.
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