Liquid, a Japanese cryptocurrency exchange, said yesterday that it had suffered a cyber attack and a theft estimated at 94 million dollars. Liquid was founded in 2014 and - according to the information reported on its website - operates in over one hundred countries around the world with more than 800,000 customers. WHAT ARE "HOT" AND "COLD" WALLETS The company announced on Twitter the suspension of deposit and withdrawal operations and the movement of assets from "hot" to "cold" portfolios. A “hot” wallet is an online digital wallet that allows users to access their cryptocurrency reserves with ease. "Cold" wallets, on the other hand, are offline: accessing them is more difficult, and therefore safer. COLLABORATION WITH ELLIPTIC In an attempt to recover the stolen funds, Liquid is partnering with British blockchain analytics firm Elliptic. Almost half of the stolen sum - 45 million dollars out of 94 in all - are tokens linked to the Ethereum platform. By token we mean the information present in the blockchain that guarantees a person the right to a sum of cryptocurrencies. Elliptic explained that the perpetrators of the cyberattack are converting these tokens into the cryptocurrency Ether (Ethereum's unit of account) through decentralized peer-to-peer exchanges. THE ATTACK TO POLY NETWORK Just a week ago, another cryptocurrency platform, Poly Network, suffered a cyber attack that led to the stealing of cryptocurrencies worth around $ 600 million. The episode was spoken of as the biggest theft ever in the world of decentralized finance (DeFi), that is, the system that uses blockchain-based smart contracts instead of the "classic" intermediation of banks. ATTACKS ON DECENTRALIZED FINANCE Cyber attacks related to decentralized finance amounted to $ 361 million in the first seven months of 2021. According to analytics firm CipherTrace, this is almost three times the value recorded in all of 2020. What makes these attacks attractive, according to specialist firm DeFi Pulse, is the amount of money contained in decentralized finance applications, used to exchange funds without intermediaries: about $ 80 billion.
Liquid said he suffered a $ 94 million cryptocurrency theft
All the details