WazirX, the Indian cryptocurrency exchange, has announced a substantial $23 million bounty as part of its ongoing efforts to recover $234 million in assets stolen during a recent hacker attack. Co-founder Nischal Shetty disclosed this significant increase in the bounty program through social media platform X on July 21.
Initially, WazirX introduced a modest bounty of $10,000 worth of USDT for actionable intelligence leading to fund freezing, alongside a 5% white hat reward based on the recovered amount. However, criticism prompted successive increases, first to $11.5 million and eventually to the current $23 million reward.
The security breach, occurring during European trading hours on July 18, resulted in substantial withdrawals from one of WazirX’s wallets. The exchange promptly suspended all withdrawals to investigate the incident.
According to blockchain data from Lookonchain, significant amounts of Shiba Inu (SHIB), Ethereum (ETH), Matic (MATIC), and Pepe (PEPE) tokens were among those withdrawn, totaling over $100 million in SHIB alone.
Subsequent transactions revealed that the stolen cryptocurrencies were being offloaded on the Uniswap decentralized exchange. WazirX took action by blacklisting over 2,431 accounts identified as unlawful from October 2022 to March 2023.
Nischal Shetty’s announcement underscores WazirX’s commitment to recovering the stolen assets, offering one of the largest bounties in cryptocurrency history to encourage assistance from the community and security experts.
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