WazirX increases bounty to $23 million for recovery of stolen assets

Indian cryptocurrency exchange WazirX has announced a $23 million bounty as part of its “bounty program” to recover $234 million of assets stolen in a recent hacker attack. Co-founder Nischal Shetty made the announcement on the social media platform X on Sunday, July 21.

“The total bounty has been updated to $23M; thanks, @zachxbt, for the suggestion,” Shetty posted. This marks the second increase in the reward amount aimed at retrieving the stolen assets. Initially, WazirX offered $10,000 worth of USDT for actionable intelligence, leading to the freezing of funds and a 5% incentive of the recovered amount as a white hat reward. Following criticism over the modest reward, the bounty was first increased to $11.5 million before being raised to $23 million.

The security breach occurred during European hours on Thursday, July 18, resulting in the loss of funds from one of WazirX’s wallets. WazirX confirmed the incident and initiated an investigation into the outflows, temporarily suspending all withdrawals for the day.

According to Mint, blockchain data tracked by Lookonchain revealed that over $100 million worth of Shiba Inu (SHIB) tokens were withdrawn, alongside Ethereum (ETH) valued at $52 million, Matic (MATIC) worth $11 million, and Pepe (PEPE) worth $6 million, marking substantial losses. Transactional data later indicated that the hacker was selling the stolen cryptocurrencies on the Uniswap on-chain exchange.

In response to previous security issues, WazirX had blacklisted over 2,431 accounts from October 2022 to March 2023, which were deemed unlawful.