Huobi and Shiba Inu community to help BitMart overcome $200M hack

Following a near $200 million hack on the BitMart exchange, the Shiba Inu (SHIB) community and crypto exchange Huobi Global aim to help the exchange strengthen security and track inflows of stolen assets.

On Dec. 5, crypto exchange BitMart became victim to a hot wallet compromise hosted over the Ethereum (ETH) and Binance Smart Chain (BSC) blockchains. As a result, the hackers were able to steal over $196 million, roughly $100 million over the Ethernet network and around $96 million over the BSC blockchain.

1/3 We have identified a large-scale security breach related to one of our ETH hot wallets and one of our BSC hot wallets. At this moment we are still concluding the possible methods used. The hackers were able to withdraw assets of the value of approximately USD 150 millions.

— Sheldon Xia (@sheldonbitmart) December 5, 2021

Soon after BitMart CEO Sheldon Xia confirmed the hack, Huobi announced it would help BitMart track the inflow of assets on its exchange and report matches to the stolen funds.

Huobi will do our best to assist #BitMart in handling this issue. If there are any inflows of related assets, we will report and assist in a timely manner.

— Huobi (@HuobiGlobal) December 5, 2021

Following suit, the Shiba Inu community also confirmed it would help the hacked crypto exchange, citing their already existing efforts in reviewing potential security threats for ShibaSwap, a community-built decentralized exchange.

Dear #ShibArmy,

Even though the core of our project is decentralization, we want to show our support and give some love to our friends at @BitMartExchange, who are already working hard to fix the security incident that happened yesterday. pic.twitter.com/CJZjQHaP59

— Shib (@Shibtoken) December 5, 2021

Xia also said the exchange would compensate affected investors with its own funds. “We are also talking to multiple project teams to confirm the most reasonable solutions such as token swaps. No user assets will be harmed,” he added.

The hack forced the exchange to temporarily stop all withdrawals and deposits. However, Xia is confident BitMart will resume services by Dec. 7.

Related: Synapse Bridge prevents $8M hack

Cross-chain protocol Synapse Bridge recently averted a multi-million dollar exploit on the Avalanche Neutral Dollar (nUSD) Metapool.

As Cointelegraph reported, Synapse Bridge prevented a hacker from stealing approximately $8 million worth of cryptocurrencies:

“Over the past 16 hours, we encountered and discovered a contract bug in the way that the AMM Metapool contracts handle virtual price calculations against the base pool's virtual price.”

While the threat was averted, Synapse Bridge soon deployed new nUSD pools as a means to further strengthen its security against similar attacks.