Liquid

On August 19, 2021, Liquid Global, a regulated Japanese cryptocurrency exchange, was hit by a major security breach, with $97 million in assets drained from its warm wallets across Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tron, and Ripple blockchains, as reported by Merkle Science and Cointelegraph. Detected at 01:00 UTC, the hack, likely caused by compromised private keys possibly via phishing or malware, saw 69 assets, including $13.1 million in XRP, $4.3 million in BTC, and $62.3 million in ETH/ERC-20 tokens, moved to hacker addresses like 1Fx1bhbCwp5LU2gHxfRNiSHi1QSHwZLf7q (BTC) and rfapBqj7rUkGju7oHTwBwhEyXgwkEM4yby (XRP), per Liquid’s Twitter (@Liquid_Global). Liquid, with $150 million daily volume per CoinMarketCap, suspended deposits and withdrawals, shifted assets to cold storage, and froze $16.13 million in ERC-20 tokens with community help, per Merkle Science.

Hackers swapped $45 million in Ethereum tokens via Uniswap and SushiSwap, and $4.15 million in XRP was sent to a major exchange, per Elliptic. KuCoin blacklisted hacker addresses, but no funds were recovered by August 2021, per Finance Magnates. Twitter’s @LayahHeilpern urged users to avoid exchanges, while Reddit’s u/ChainSnipe criticized Liquid’s warm wallet use after a 2020 data breach exposed user details, per ZDNET. One of 169 blockchain hacks in 2021 totaling $7 billion, per AMBCrypto, the incident, following Poly Network’s $611 million heist, fueled demands for cold wallet dominance, multi-signature authentication, and real-time blockchain monitoring to secure crypto platforms.