Mercado Bitcoin Freezes Withdrawals Following $40M Outflow Across Ten Blockchains
Key Summary
Mercado Bitcoin suspended customer withdrawals on Monday after on-chain trackers flagged $40M leaving exchange wallets across 10 distinct blockchains. Tether froze millions in stolen USDT while investigators traced destination addresses holding 106 BTC.
Key Bullets
- Mercado Bitcoin suspended deposits and withdrawals Monday after Hypernative flagged unauthorized wallet outflows totaling $40M across 10 distinct blockchains.
- Data from mempool.space confirmed the targeted Bitcoin destination address accumulated 106 BTC in a single morning transfer session.
- Tether blacklisted multiple Ethereum and Tron smart contracts to freeze more than 3.70M USDT connected to the security breach.
- The Brazilian exchange incident followed a $6.30B hot wallet breach at Binance just four days prior on October 29.
Mercado Bitcoin Halts Withdrawals Amid Outflows
Mercado Bitcoin suspended all customer deposits and withdrawals on Monday morning after unauthorized transfers drained $40.00M from exchange-controlled wallets, according to security intelligence firm Hypernative. The Brazilian exchange acknowledged the breach via social media, stating internal teams had contained the system intrusion without compromising customer balances or sensitive data. On-chain monitoring confirmed the illicit movements spanned at least 10 distinct blockchain networks, including Ethereum, Solana, Tron, and the Bitcoin network. The primary phase of the attack commenced at 2:15 UTC before intensifying sharply between 6:19 UTC and 6:53 UTC.
Tether Freezes Millions in Stolen USDT
Block-explorer records verified that the targeted Bitcoin destination address absorbed roughly 106 BTC early Monday, anchored by a single 104.4 BTC transaction executed at 6:41 UTC. Tether intervened directly by blacklisting specific EVM and Tron contracts holding illicit digital assets. Public ledger data showed the targeted Tron address locked 708,243 USDT while the Ethereum contract retained over 3.00M USDT. Investigators at Hypernative noted that the attacker executed the transfers using standard signed transaction authorization protocols, leaving the exact vector of key compromise entirely unconfirmed by platform developers.
Breach Follows Historic Binance Hot Wallet Theft
The security failure at Mercado Bitcoin occurred only four days after Binance reported a historic $6.30B hot wallet theft on October 29. Security researchers classified the Binance event as the largest digital asset heist on record, tracing the exploit to a compromised DevOps engineer workstation that bypassed standard withdrawal controls. Binance partners subsequently managed to freeze roughly $3.00B of those stolen funds through coordinated on-chain blacklists. Exchanges continue scrambling to audit private key management infrastructure as systemic drainage events disrupt global liquidity channels.
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