Mercado Bitcoin exchanged hacked for $46M

Brazilian cryptocurrency exchange, Mercado Bitcoin has been reportedly hacked for whopping 46 million dollars. Authorities and stable coin issuers have already frozen 9 million dollars in stables but rest of the tokens can only be traced, not frozen.

Here is list of tokens frozen and their respective values.

372.99B $PEPE ($1.79M)
12.82K $AAVE ($1.61M)
769.95K $PENDLE ($1.35M)
29.83K $EVA ($1.26M)
1.98M $VIRTUAL ($1.15M)
147.84K $UNI ($1.04M)
2.67M $ONDO ($1.03M)

So, what happens to these tokens? Highly likely they will be dumped on a decentralized exchange like Uniswap and converted to Ethereum which will then to sent to Tornado Cash so that it becomes untraceable.

Tokens like PEPE, AAVE and PENDLE trade on thinner books than bitcoin, so a dump moves price fast. Watch the exploiter address for DEX swaps or exchange deposits before panicking on these tokens.

That 1.98M VIRTUAL ($1.15M) is 22% of all open VIRTUAL perps on Hyperliquid ($5.25M), and the $1.35M of PENDLE is 15% of its $9.2M. Those are the thin books if he sells.

Anyway, that’s brutal for anyone holding those bags right now, wonder where they’ll try to dump the rest. Nice that part of it was frozen quickly, but another cryptocurrency exchange hack in this market is rough. Hopefully users get made whole.