AscendEX Loses About $78 Million To Hot Wallet Hack of Ethereum, BSC, and Polygon Blockchains

Global digital assets trading platform AscendEX has just recorded a loss of $77.7 million following a recent hot wallet vulnerability, allowing hackers to gain access and then make away with tokens hosted over the Ethereum (ETH), Binance Smart Chain (BSC), and Polygon (POLY) blockchains.

Meanwhile, AscendEX has been quick to sound a note of warning about the hack to its users. In a Sunday statement, the firm insists that, despite their attempts, the hackers could not access the cold wallet reserves of the company. The firm also assured its users that anyone whose funds have been stolen in the attack has nothing to worry about. AscendEX will fully cover the losses and refund all affected users.

AscendEX has now launched a full investigation into the incident to determine the real extent of the hack and to know exactly what needs to be done to prevent such attacks from happening again in the future.

AscendEX Estimated Losses From The Hack

From the data available on Etherscan, blockchain security and data analytics company PeckShield has given an estimate of AscendEX losses. The security company says that $60 million worth of tokens were transferred out, over the Ethereum blockchain, while $8.5 million and $9.2 million worth of tokens were stolen from Polygon and the Binance Smart Chain respectively. That’s about $77.7 million in total.

Although AscendEX is yet to come out to give official numbers If the exact worth of tokens that the hackers made away with, popular tokens that were stolen in the hack include Tether (USDT), Shiba Inu (SHIB), and USD Coin (USDC).

Recall that in a similar attack on December 5, crypto exchange Bitmart lost about $200 million to a hot wallet compromise just like this, over the Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain blockchains, before Shiba Inu finally came to Bitmart’s rescue.

Following that attack, BitMart CEO Sheldon Xia immediately announced a temporary halt on all withdrawals and deposits, claiming they’ll resume step by step, even as further investigations are being carried out.