A security firm said that hackers took $196 million from Bitmart.
Bitmart confirmed the hack in an official statement Saturday night, saying that hackers withdrew about $150 million in assets.
Bitmart said in a statement that all withdrawals had been temporarily suspended and that a thorough security review was underway.
The first to notice the breach was Peckshield, who noted that one of Bitmart's addresses showed a steady outflow of tens of millions of dollars.
Bitmart lost around $100 million in various cryptocurrencies on the ethereum blockchain and another $96 million in coins on the binance smart chain, according to a report. Binance coin, safemoon, and shiba inu were among the more than 20 token that the hackers stole.
Bitmart says that only a small percentage of the exchange's assets were held in the affected ethereum and binance smart chain hot wallet. The statement said that all other wallets were safe.
People who hold their own currency can store it in a variety of ways. A hot wallet is connected to the internet and allows owners to access and spend their coins easily. The trade-off is exposure to bad actors.
CNBC reached out to Bitmart employees to ask if customer funds had been targeted in the hack, and if users would be reimbursed. CNBC has not yet heard back, but an email to the work address of the Bitmart founder and CEO bounced back with a message that read, "Access denied."
Bitmart, which offers a mix of spot transactions, leveraged futures trading, as well as lending and staking services, typically ranks as one of the top centralizedcryptocurrencies exchanges by volume.
According to Bitmart, it's not clear what methods the hackers used, but what happened after the breach was pretty straightforward. The security firm said it was a classic case of transfer-out, swap, and wash.
After transferring funds from Bitmart, the hackers used a speach of a speach of a speach of a speach of a speach of a speach of a speach of a speach of a speach of a s The money was deposited into a privacy mixer called Tornado Cash, which makes it harder to trace.
Rick Holland is the chief information security officer at Digital Shadows, a cyberthreat intelligence company. Holland told CNBC that these services allow users to combine illegal funds with clean funds to create a new type of coin.
Even though the ledger is public, there are still ways to make it difficult for investigators to trace transactions.
There has been a wave of recent hacks.
Celsius Network lost funds as a result of the hack of BadgerDAO, though it didn't specify how much.
A hacker stole more than $600 million of Poly Network's token in August. The attacker returned most of the money.
