BREAKING: Liquid exchange hacked to the tune of $80 million

Japanese exchange Liquid has been hacked, with about $80 million in digital assets moved off the platform.

The exchange confirmed the security breach in a Thursday tweet, with Liquid revealing the wallet addresses implicated in the breach. The exchange noted that only its warm wallets were affected, adding that its assets are currently being moved into cold storage.

Withdrawals and deposits have been suspended on Liquid, with the exchange promising to provide regular updates as its investigation unfolds.

The following assets had been transferred to hacker's following addresses (Further investigation to come):BTC: 1Fx1bhbCwp5LU2gHxfRNiSHi1QSHwZLf7qETH/EWT: 0x5578840aae68682a9779623fa9e8714802b59946TRX: TSpcue3bDfZNTP1CutrRrDxRPeEvWhuXbpXRP: rfapBqj7rUkGju7oHTwBwhEyXgwkEM4yby

— Liquid Global Official (@Liquid_Global) August 19, 2021

While Liquid is yet to confirm exactly how much has been taken, Cointelegraph has identified that more than 107 Bitcoin (BTC), 9,000,000 Tron (TRX), 11,000,000 XRP, and almost $60 million worth of Ether (ETH), and ERC-20 tokens appear to have been taken by the hackers.

There were unconfirmed reports that the Ethereum wallet compromised held deposits from crypto yield provider Celsius Network. In April, Celsius announced that it had integrated with Liquid to offer the exchange’s customers a compounding return on digital asset purchases.

However Celsius founder Alex Mashinsky told Cointelegraph that none of their wallets at Liquid had been affected by the hack.

Another exchange, KuCoin, promptly responded to the hack by blacklisting the addresses involved in the hack, according to a tweet from the exchange’s CEO, Jonny Lyu.

We are aware of the #LiquidGlobal security incident, and the hacker's addresses have been added to the blacklist of #KuCoin. Hope everything is OK. https://t.co/IasscGItZH

— Johnny_KuCoin (@lyu_johnny) August 19, 2021

In November 2018, Liquid suffered a breach that saw its users’ personal information exposed to hackers, possibly including names, addresses and passwords.

Updated with a clarification from Alex Mashinsky.