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Brazil’s premier cryptocurrency platform, Mercado Bitcoin (MB), confirmed it was targeted in a hack, a fact corroborated by various blockchain reports. Following this confirmation, the exchange paused all deposit and withdrawal activities.
Security firm Hypernative puts the estimated damage from the compromised wallets at $40 million. This breach follows closely on the heels of Binance’s record-breaking $6 billion hack.
Below is the complete statement (translated from Portuguese):
We identified and quickly contained a security incident in one of our systems overnight.
We stress that:• There was no loss to clients;• There was no data leak.
As a preventive protection measure, deposits and withdrawals are temporarily suspended. Our teams are mobilized investigating the case, tracing the assets and coordinating measures with the competent authorities.
We will keep providing regular updates here.
The statement gives no timeline for reopening deposits and withdrawals.
What Hypernative flagged
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Hypernative reports that the suspected attack spanned wallets on at least 10 different blockchains. These networks include Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Tron, Polygon, Arbitrum, Avalanche, BNB Smart Chain, and Stellar.
Suspicious activity began around 11 PM on Sunday night in Brazil.
Funds from wallets linked to MB were largely moved to new addresses associated with the suspected attacker.
MB’s statement refers to an incident "overnight," the same period as those transfers, but it does not directly connect the two.
The transactions were standard cryptocurrency transfers rather than exploits of smart contract vulnerabilities. They were signed as though authorized by the source wallets themselves.
Hypernative notes uncertainty regarding how the attacker acquired this signing ability. Key questions remain about potential private key exposure and infrastructure failures in the transfer authorization process.
What is still unknown
Several answers are still missing, including the incident's origin, the actual amount lost, whether the transferred assets belonged to clients or the exchange, and the timeline for resuming normal deposits and withdrawals.
MB states it is currently investigating, tracing the assets, and collaborating with authorities while promising regular updates.
This is a developing story.
