Indian crypto exchange CoinDCX has confirmed a massive cyberattack that resulted in the theft of about $44 million (nearly ₹380 crore) from one of its internal accounts.
Neeraj Khandelwal, co-founder of CoinDCX, announced the breach on X (formerly Twitter), saying, “The total amount lost was ~$44Mn out of our treasury assets. CoinDCX Treasury will be bearing these losses. Our first and foremost objective throughout the day has been to first secure assets.”
What went wrong?
According to CoinDCX’s CEO Sumit Gupta, the breach involved an “internal operational account” used for managing liquidity on a partner platform. Gupta described the attack as “sophisticated,” involving a compromise of the company’s server systems.
Gupta said the team moved quickly to isolate the affected account, stopping the attack from spreading further. The company has now brought in cybersecurity experts to investigate the breach, fix vulnerabilities, and track the movement of the stolen funds.
Steps to recover funds
To address the losses, Gupta announced that CoinDCX will soon launch a bug bounty program and is working closely with the partner exchange to block and recover assets.
“Every security incident is a learning, and we will learn from this and further strengthen our platform,” Gupta said. “More importantly, this is our time to win this war against cyberthreats in the industry, and we commit to working together with experts to secure our industry.”
User funds unaffected
CoinDCX has stressed that no customer funds were impacted. Trading activities and INR withdrawals are continuing as normal, though the Web3 section has been temporarily paused as a precaution.
“All the customer assets are safe and the trading activity plus the INR withdrawals continue unhindered,” Khandelwal assured, adding that the team is fully focused on managing the situation.
A worrying pattern in Indian crypto
This is the second major cyberattack on an Indian crypto exchange in the past year. In July 2024, WazirX lost $234 million after one of its wallets hosted on Liminal was hacked. That attack led to the suspension of trading and withdrawals, causing panic among millions of users.
WazirX’s attempts to recover funds — including a white hat bounty program offering up to $23 million in rewards — have so far only yielded $3 million, and investigations later linked the attack to North Korean state-backed hackers.
The CoinDCX hack highlights ongoing concerns over the security of crypto exchanges, especially in the Indian market, where regulation is still evolving and cybercriminals continue to target vulnerabilities.
