Hackers Drain $44M From Indian Crypto Giant CoinDCX

India’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, CoinDCX, confirmed on Saturday that hackers drained $44.2 million from an internal operational account, though the company assures that all customer assets remain completely secure.

How the $44 Million CoinDCX Hack Unfolded

CoinDCX co-founder and CEO Sumit Gupta disclosed in a post on X that the security breach targeted an internal operational account. This specific account was utilized exclusively for liquidity provisioning on an unnamed partner exchange. Gupta emphasized that because the exchange segregates operational funds from customer wallets, user balances were entirely unaffected by the exploit.

On-chain security researcher ZachXBT first flagged the suspicious activity, reporting that approximately $44.2 million had been siphoned from the exchange’s reserves. According to ZachXBT’s Telegram channel, the attacker’s address was initially funded using 1 ETH via the privacy mixer Tornado Cash. The perpetrator subsequently bridged a portion of the stolen funds from Solana to Ethereum.

Tracking the Stolen Crypto Assets

CoinDCX confirmed the exact scale of the loss, noting that the stolen funds were routed through Solana-Ethereum bridges. The assets have since been consolidated into two primary holdings: 4,443 Ethereum and 155,830 Solana. Currently, these funds remain dormant in the hacker’s wallets.

To address the breach, the Indian exchange is actively collaborating with India’s Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) alongside partner exchanges to trace the movement of the stolen assets. Registered with the Indian government’s Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU), CoinDCX serves more than 16 million users and supports trading for over 500 digital assets.

Treasury Absorbs Losses as Recovery Bounty Launches

Gupta stated that the platform quickly contained the security incident by isolating the affected operational account. Because the exposure was limited to this single segregated account, CoinDCX is fully absorbing the $44.2 million loss using its own treasury reserves, ensuring no financial impact on its user base.

In an effort to reclaim the stolen assets, CoinDCX launched a “recovery bounty” program on Monday. The initiative promises to award up to 25% of any recovered funds to individuals who provide actionable information leading to the tracking and retrieval of the digital assets.

Gupta noted that while recovering the funds is a priority, identifying and prosecuting the perpetrators remains the company’s primary objective to prevent similar exploits from targeting the wider cryptocurrency industry.

A Growing Threat in the Indian Crypto Landscape

This exploit occurs almost a year after a massive security breach at WazirX, another major Indian cryptocurrency exchange. The WazirX hack resulted in the loss of $230 million—nearly half of its total reserves—forcing the platform to halt trading operations. It remains unclear if there is any connection between the WazirX exploit and the recent breach at CoinDCX.