South Korean exchange Upbit 342,000 ETH disappeared, hacking or ghosts?

Editor's Note: This article comes fromNakamoto Shallot (ID: xcongapp), Author: Sister Xiaocong, published by Odaily with authorization.

Editor's Note: This article comes from

Nakamoto Shallot (ID: xcongapp)

Nakamoto Shallot (ID: xcongapp)

, Author: Sister Xiaocong, published by Odaily with authorization.

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On the afternoon of November 27, according to whale_alert monitoring, a series of large transfers including ETH and TRX occurred at the Upbit exchange address, as well as a small amount of XLM, BTT, OMG and other cryptocurrencies.

Some of the transferred cryptocurrencies went to the Bittrex exchange, and some went to unknown wallet addresses.

The first transfer (the only abnormal transaction mentioned in the exchange below) occurred at 12:06:45 Beijing time, 342,000 ETH (market value about $49,877,270) from the upbit exchange address (starting with 0x5e032243d507) ) to an unknown wallet address (starting with 0xa09871aeadf49).

Then at 12:34 Beijing time, the South Korean exchange Upbit announced that due to the inspection of the deposit and withdrawal server, the deposit and withdrawal of cryptocurrency was temporarily suspended. (KRW deposit and withdrawal service can be used normally).

The suspension of deposits and withdrawals after this series of large-value transfers has aroused widespread concern in the encryption community. According to South Korean media etnews, an expert said about these large-value transfers: "As for whether it is currently being hacked or the exchange is transferred to a cold wallet. Tidy up, there are differences."

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Upbit response: Only one large ETH transfer is an abnormal transaction, and the rest are wallet sorting

In order to protect your assets, upbit has made the following responses.

1. To secure your assets, the 342,000 ETH transferred to an unknown wallet is expected to be replenished with spare assets. Relevant work is currently in progress and will be notified when it is completed.

3. It is estimated that it will take at least 2 weeks until the withdrawal resumes. When complete, you will be notified again.

Only this one transaction was abnormal, and the rest of the large-scale transactions involved transferring all encrypted assets to cold wallets.

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Analyst: There is a possibility of insider operation

Analyst Joseph Young tweeted: UPbit did not use the word "hack" to describe the $51.3 million loss. At this point, consider the possibility of insider (manipulation). Actually, I don't think the UPbit event will lower the price of Bitcoin because it's not true. UPbit is recovering all losses. If it's relevant, it's "hackers" selling, which is hard to do so quickly after an event.