Scott Melker discusses the $40 million drained from Mercado bitcoin, a Brazilian exchange, causing it to halt deposits and withdrawals, all coming days after the $6.3 billion Binance hack.
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Brazil's Mercado Bitcoin halts withdrawals after 40 million drained across 10 chains.
The Brazilian exchange that nobody outside of Brazil has ever heard of.
Doesn't say that. Paused deposits and withdrawals after wallets on at least 10 chains were emptied days after the 6.3 billion Binance hack. What the hell is going on right now.
Now, I tried to dig into this. There's actually not much clarity at the moment about how this happened, but Binance was not seemingly an AI related hack.
North Korea actually has has used uh social engineering and other tactics that are unrelated uh generally to AI.
No indication yet that this is AI related either, which is just crazy that the security is so poor at this point on these exchanges that they can be hacked for millions and millions and millions of dollars.
Now, I don't know how much in total assets Mercado had, but I have to amount I have to imagine that on a smaller exchange in Brazil, 38 million to 40 million is a hell of a lot of money.
Now, the company says approximately 11 million has been blocked with industry partners. Chain analysis says it helped coordinate freezes with law enforcement and stable coin issuers. Dude, like these stable coin issuers are working overtime right now on a job that they didn't expect to freeze funds from hacks
nearly every single day. I mean, crypto's busiest department this week is incident response.
Like every single chain is getting a call from exchanges all over the world on a daily basis asking to freeze funds.
It's a complete mess out there and honestly, it kind of puts a question mark around the decentralization of crypto.
Obviously, I'm very happy that they're helping people get their money back. I'm happy that these assets are being frozen, but remember, there's a reason Bitcoin is different from everything else, and there's a reason Bitcoin itself has never been hacked. Yes, the exchanges can be hacked. Yes, custodies can be hacked.
But Bitcoin itself has never been hacked and it's more important than ever for people to understand that difference.
I've been getting the texts from my friends, is crypto over? What do you mean is crypto over? Well, apparently it can never be hacked.
