After roughly four months of recovery efforts, WazirX, the largest crypto exchange to have operated in India, has frozen $3 million in USDT from last year's devastating $230 million security breach in July.
WazirX is undergoing a series of tests "restructuring proceedings" It is a work to "trace and retrieve stolen assets," A statement that is shared by Decrypt reads.
Freezing a portion of the stablecoins associated with the incident marks WazirX's first significant breakthrough in a complex recovery effort that spans multiple legal proceedings across jurisdictions.
Nischal shetty, WazirX’s co-founder revealed at a Town Hall meeting in November of last year that they are working to recover and plan to resume trading before February.
Recoveries and litigation
The massive security breach that took place last year in July compromised 45% of the exchange's reserves.
The initial investigation in the days following the incident focused on Ethereum ERC-20 tokens held in hot wallets.
On August 28, 2024, the Singapore High Court granted WazirX's parent company, Zettai Pte Ltd, a four-month moratorium to restructure its liabilities pending investigations from the breach.
The same day CoinSwitch, a rival exchange, filed a suit over locked funds totaling $9.7 Million, which included 28.7 Crores in ERC-20 Tokens and 39.9 Crores in other digital assets.
Arkham Intelligence’s analysts tracked Tornado Cash in September that same year and were able trace approximately $50,000,000 of stolen funds. Threat actors then accelerated their money laundering operations through Tornado Cash during the subsequent months.
It was a transfer of approximately $10 million worth of ETH, which took place on September 25th four months earlier.
In October, the exchange announced plans to reveal 240,000 wallets addresses and balances as part of its initiative for transparency during debt restructuring.
Denying threats actors
The crypto exchange's update on its recovery efforts follows a joint statement from the U.S., Japan, and South Korea that was published this week. The statement attributed the attacks to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK, or North Korea), including the infamous Lazarus Group.
There are many threats to your safety. "a significant threat to the integrity and stability of the international financial system," This is how the sentence reads:
In the statement, the three countries stated that the document was released with the intention of depriving the terrorists any income they could have gained from their exploits. "unlawful weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programs."
The WazirX hack ranks third among the largest crypto hacks and exploits recorded in 2024, following PlayDapp's $290 million and DMM Bitcoin's $308 million in losses.
Stacy Elliott is the editor.