AscendEX Hacked For Over $80M Hosted Via ERC-20, BSC & Polygon Hot Wallets

Crypto exchange AscendEX on Sunday announced via a tweet that its hot wallets have been compromised with hackers stealing over $80 million.

Furthermore, the exchange noted that its cold wallets were not affected by the hack and assured that victims of the attack will be reimbursed 100% for losses encountered.

“22:00 UTC 12/11, We have detected a number of ERC-20, BSC, and Polygon tokens transferred from our hot wallet. Cold Wallet is NOT affected. Investigation underway. If any user’s funds are affected by the incident, they will be covered completely by AscendEX,” the exchange tweeted.

According to discoveries by blockchain security firm, PeckShield the hack was carried out on three blockchains including Ethereum (ERC-20), Binance Smart Chain (BSC), and Polygon.

Over 25 tokens including Tether (USDT), USD Coin (USDC), were stolen via the ERC-20 blockchain alone with losses amounting to $60 million, 9.2 million via BSC, and $8.5 million on Polygon, which is approximately $78 million.

“Estimated loss @AscendEX_Global: $77.7M in total ($60M on @ethereum $9.2M @BinanceChain $8.5M @0xPolygon). Here is the list of the transferred-out assets and their amounts on @ethereum https://t.co/VC4DKOwu4f,” PeckShield tweeted.

Cryptocurrency hacks have become exponentially high over the years, which has, in turn, caused the trillion-dollar industry to lose huge amounts of money in the process.

Just a few months ago, Japanese crypto exchange Liquid Global lost over $80 million to hackers in cryptocurrencies including  Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Ripple (XRP), and others.

In a similar event earlier this month, Decentralized Finance (DeFi) platform BadgerDAO suffered a $120 million hack in what was speculated to be a front-end attack where the hackers gained unauthorized access to the front end of the BadgerDAO website and cut off users’ transactions from there.

Meanwhile, last week, Coinfomania reported that crypto exchange Bitmart was hacked for over $200 million carried out on ETH and BSC blockchains.

According to the report, the hackers stole over 20 tokens including Safemoon, BSC-USD, Binance Coin (BNB), BPay, and a large number of memecoins.

Notably, a day after the hack, the exchange later released a statement saying victims would be compensated from the company’s pocket money.