Japanese Fiat to Crypto Exchange Liquid Announces Hackers Steal Nearly $100 million in Assets

August 20, 2021 - Another week, another crypto exchange hack. Japanese Fiat to Crypto exchange Liquid announced on Twitter on Thursday morning that digital assets in its warm wallets were "compromised" and all assets had been moved into the exchanges cold wallet.

The company confirmed that: A total of approximately 91.35mm USDe of crypto assets were moved out of Liquid wallets by an unauthorized party. Of this amount, 16.13mm USDe of ERC-20 assets have been frozen (disabled for onchain movement) due to the assistance of the crypto community and other exchanges. 69 different crypto assets were misappropriated and sent to other exchanges or DeFi swapping venues. Assets placed in Liquid Earn are not impacted.

Liquid was established in 2014, and the company states that its mission is, "to build a secure and modern-day cryptocurrency ecosystem for traders and consumers to learn, grow, and leverage the benefits of financial freedom that blockchain technology enables." The exchange claims to be "consistently ranked among the top 10 cryptocurrency exchanges globally based on daily traded spot volume with deep BTC/JPY liquidity".

Update August 22 - Liquid has provided a further update ("Incident Report") on Sunday 22, August. The company has advised that it has set up its new MPC infrastructure with, "heightened security, and are now in the process of testing and migrating our assets to the new secure vaults. We expect to restore services early next week." In the meantime Liquid is advising all clients to not deposit any crypto assets until further notice: "To ensure the safety of funds, please do not deposit any crypto assets to your Liquid wallets until further notice".