Mercado Bitcoin freezes withdrawals after multi‑chain theft exceeding $40 million
Brazilian exchange Mercado Bitcoin halted deposits and withdrawals after wallets across at least ten blockchains were drained in a $40 million hack.
Mercado Bitcoin, a Brazilian cryptocurrency exchange, suspended all deposits and withdrawals on Monday after wallets linked to the platform were emptied across at least ten different blockchains.
Security analysts estimate the loss exceeds $40 million. The biggest outflows occurred between 06:19 and 06:53 UTC, when funds were transferred from wallets on Ethereum, Solana, Tron, Polygon, Arbitrum, Avalanche, BSC, Stellar and other chains to new addresses.
The attacker now holds approximately 2,852 ETH, 106 BTC, 10,700 SOL, 6.7 million XLM and 77,000 AVAX, plus more than 200 additional tokens, according to a report from Opsek founder Pablo Sabbatella. The transfers were simple transactions, not smart‑contract exploits, and the method used to obtain signing access has not been disclosed.
In a statement posted on X, Mercado Bitcoin said it had “identified and swiftly contained” the security incident, affirmed that there was no harm to customers and no data breach, and announced the pause of deposits and withdrawals as a precaution while teams investigate, track the assets and coordinate with authorities.
The exchange later published the destination addresses on EVM chains, Bitcoin, Solana, Stellar and Tron to aid in tracking the stolen funds.
No attribution has been made, and there is no public evidence linking the incident to the recent Binance hack, which the FBI attributes to North Korea’s TraderTraitor group and involved over $6 billion.
Tether founder Paolo Ardoino confirmed that $4.5 million worth of USDT linked to the hack has been frozen.
Multi‑chain attacks underscore the growing complexity of securing digital asset platforms.
