Bitbns

On February 1, 2022, Bitbns, an India-based cryptocurrency exchange, was hit by a hack that drained $7.5 million in Polygon (MATIC), BNB, and AAVE tokens from its hot wallets, as exposed by crypto sleuth ZachXBT on February 28, 2023, per Cointelegraph. Detected at 15:00 UTC after unusually high server throughput, the attacker exploited pricing discrepancies and withdrawal anomalies, converting stolen tokens to ETH and dispersing them across multiple addresses, per Etherscan (0x24f361E1eeEdF29fd6D724C9393132D61c51ebB1).

Bitbns, with a $10 million daily trading volume and 4 million users per CoinMarketCap, initially masked the breach as “system maintenance,” only admitting the hack 13 months later on March 1, 2023, during a YouTube AMA, per the article.

CEO Gaurav Dahake downplayed it as a “small incident,” claiming law enforcement, specifically Cyber Crime Bengaluru, advised silence until the investigation concluded, recovering some funds with other exchanges’ help, per CoinDesk.

No official loss figure was confirmed by Bitbns, and user compensation remains unclear, per Reddit (r/CryptoIndia). One of 305 hacks in 2022, costing $3.7 billion, per Chainalysis, this incident, alongside LCX’s $7.94 million loss, underscores the perils of hot wallet vulnerabilities and lax transparency.

Bitbns’ tale is a crypto noir, where delayed truths and digital heists remind us: in the blockchain’s shadowy alleys, only robust security and open communication can keep the wolves at bay.