Nearly $100m stolen in Japan crypto heist

In a latest digital scam days after one of the biggest ever cryptocurrency heists, hackers have stolen $97 million worth of Ethereum and other digital coins belonging to Japanese cryptocurrency exchange Liquid.

The company, in a tweet posted late Thursday, announced what it termed “compromise”, saying that it is moving assets that were not affected into more secure “cold wallet” storage, reports Fortune magazine. 

The company has also suspended deposits and withdrawals after the second major theft of cryptocurrencies in recent days.

Last week, digital token platform Poly Network was at the centre of a $600m heist and since then, the hacker has returned around $427m of the assets, according to BBC. 

"We are sorry to announce that #LiquidGlobal warm wallets were compromised, we are moving assets into the cold wallet," the company said on Twitter.

Founded in 2014, Liquid operates in over 100 countries and serves millions of customers around the world.

It is one of the world's top 20 biggest cryptocurrency exchanges by daily trading volumes, according to CoinMarketCap data. 

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“Liquid’s teams are still assessing the attack vector used and taking measures to mitigate the impact to users,” the company said in a blog post. “Liquid will continue to do everything in its power to mitigate the impact from this incident and restore full service as soon as possible.”

Liquid did not put a dollar figure on the amount, but blockchain analytics company Elliptic said its analysis estimates the losses at about $97 million.

Of that, $45 million were in Ethereum tokens, which are being converted into Ether, preventing the hacker from having those assets frozen. Other cryptos taken in the heist include Bitcoin, XRP, and stablecoins.

Liquid is one of the 20 biggest crypto exchanges, as ranked by daily trading volume, per CoinMarketCap. In the past 24 hours, it has traded nearly $141 million in crypto.

The news of the hack comes just over a week after hackers took $600 million in cryptocurrency, which is likely the biggest heist ever in the world of decentralized finance. Those attackers returned half of what they stole the next day and eventually returned almost all of it ($135 million remains locked in an account that requires a password from the hacker).