BitMart has pledged to compensate victims of its recent $196 million hack. This is according to a recently released statement from BitMart’s Team.
The hack was first revealed by Peckshield, a blockchain security and data analytics company, who initially identified a transfer of roughly $100 million over the Ethereum blockchain. Further investigation from the team revealed a concurrent hack of $96 million over the crypto exchange’s BSC reserves.
The exchange claimed in the statement that the total amount lost represented only a “tiny percentage of assets on BitMart,” adding that other wallets were “unharmed.”
What BitMart is saying
BitMart suffered a major hack over the weekend when the private key to two of its hot wallets was compromised. The wallets were linked to Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain security firms.
The statement reads, “In response to this incident, BitMart has completed initial security checks and identified affected assets. This security breach was mainly caused by a stolen private key that had two of our hot wallets compromised. Other assets with BitMart are safe and unharmed.
“BitMart will use our funding to cover the incident and compensate affected users. We are also talking to multiple project teams to confirm the most reasonable solutions, such as token swaps. No user assets will be harmed.”
Sheldon Xia, the founder and CEO of BitMart, has since promised to pay users with BitMart’s own funds. “BitMart will use our funding to cover the problem and reimburse affected users,” he wrote in a Monday tweet.
The Cayman Islands-based centralized exchange announced resuming its normal operations today. It stated, “In terms of asset deposit and withdrawals, we are confident that deposit and withdrawal functions will gradually begin on December 7, 2021. The detailed timelines will be announced very soon.”