Mixin Network Crypto Hackers Swipe $200 Million

Digital asset transaction network Mixin has halted withdrawals and deposits following a $200 million hack.

In a post on Twitter/X Sunday (Sept. 24) night, the company said the attack happened early Saturday (Sept. 23), resulting in the loss of “some assets.”

“After initial verification, the funds involved are approximately US$200 million. Deposit and withdrawal services on Mixin Network have been temporarily suspended,” the company wrote.

“After discussion and consensus among all nodes, these services will be reopened once the vulnerabilities are confirmed and fixed. During this period, transfers are not affected.”

The Mixin team is still due to announce a solution for dealing with the lost assets, the post said.

The breach follows a year in which decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms were hit hard by hacks. DeFi is a type of financial technology that employs distributed ledger technology, including the blockchains used for cryptocurrencies, in place of traditional financial intermediaries and trust mechanisms with peer-to-peer protocols and smart contracts that are designed to make it easier for people to use money without depending on third parties.

In 2022 DeFi protocols and platforms suffered the largest breaches for the year — accounting 82.1% of all stolen assets, or a whopping $3.1 billion, research by Chainalysis found.

That figure was up from 73.3% the previous year, with 64% of the losses suffered by DeFi actors coming from cross-chain bridge protocols.

The Mixin hack comes weeks after the FBI announced the theft of $40 million in bitcoin by a hacker group with ties to the North Korean government.

“Over the last 24 hours, the FBI tracked cryptocurrency stolen by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) TraderTraitor-affiliated actors (also known as Lazarus Group and APT38),” the agency said in August.

According to the FBI, the group was behind a number of recent “high-profile” crypto heists, including the $100 million theft of virtual currency from Atomic Wallet on June 2.

Also last month, it was reported that crypto lender Exactly Protocol suffered a hack that led to the loss of as much as $12 million. As PYMNTS wrote, the decentralized credit market, operating on the Optimism network, was targeted by a bridge exploit to move deposits to Optimism, before transferring the stolen funds back to Ethereum.