Liquid, the Japanese cryptocurrency exchange, announced that it had been hacked. Although the company did not disclose the amount of damage, the hackers may have stolen about $97 million worth of encrypted currency, according to Elliptic, a blockchain analysis firm.
Liquid said in a statement that its operations and technical team "detected unauthorized access to some encrypted wallets managed by Liquid" and later found that "approximately $91.35 million of encrypted assets had been removed from Liquid wallets by unauthorized parties." With the help of encrypted communities and other exchanges, $16.13 million worth of ERC-20 assets have been frozen.
The company urged its users not to deposit any encrypted assets in its mobile wallet and said it had stopped all withdrawals in cryptocurrency. Currently, the company is working with other exchanges to track the flow of encrypted currencies, freeze stolen funds and return them to customers.
Liquid said it was still assessing how the attack occurred and said it would keep releasing the latest information.
Liquid is one of the top 20 cryptocurrency exchanges in the world by daily trading volume, processing more than $133 million in transactions in the past 24 hours, according to CoinMarketCap.
This is the second major encrypted currency theft in more than a week. On Aug. 10, hackers stole more than $600m worth of digital tokens from Poly Network, a so-called decentralized financial company, but later returned the assets.