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

Over $80 million worth of digital assets has been removed from Liquid Global exchange. KuCoin has responded by blacklisting the addresses that received stolen funds.

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: 1Fx1bhbCwp5LU2gHxfRNiSHi1QSHwZLf7q
ETH/EWT: 0x5578840aae68682a9779623fa9e8714802b59946
TRX: TSpcue3bDfZNTP1CutrRrDxRPeEvWhuXbp
XRP: 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 are 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.

The announcement noted that Liquid became one of the first fiat-to-cryptocurrency exchanges to support Celsius’s native CEL token in 2019, stating that the two firms “have continued to grow their partnership” since.

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.