Bancor, a crypto company that touts a decentralized exchange service, has lost some $23.5 million of cryptocurrency tokens belonging to its users following a hack.
The Israel-based company raised over $150 million in an ICO last year and its services include a wallet with a built-in exchange service. Today, Bancor said in a statement that “a wallet used to upgrade some smart contracts was compromised.” As a result, the attackers made off with $12.5 million in Ether, $1 million in Pundi X’s NPXS token and $10 million in Bancor’s BNT.
The stolen BNT has since been frozen using a mechanism built into the Bancor Protocol. Bancor stated that this was built in to “be used in an extreme situation to recover from a security breach, allowing Bancor to effectively stop the thief from running away with the stolen tokens”
However, the stolen ETH and other tokens are still compromised. The wallet which contains the stolen ether can be viewed here. Bancor stated that they are now “working together with dozens of cryptocurrency exchanges to trace the stolen funds and make it more difficult for the thief to liquidate them”.
They stated that they would continue to post updates on any further developments on their Telegram channel and on Twitter. The exchange is currently down. In a statement to Cointelegraph, Konstantin Gladych, CEO of Changelly, stated that parts of the stolen funds have been exchanged via Changelly.
Exit scams are a dime a dozen in initial coin offerings, with hacking often used as an excuse as the founders walk out the door with the tokens raised. But that doesn’t appear to be the case with Bancor at this point given that the company itself raised $153 million in its ICO in January 2017. If this were a scam, the founders wouldn’t have stuck around for 18 months and they would have stolen much larger sums of cryptocurrency.
The Bancor site remains offline as of 10:40 p.m. EDT, with the company hoping to resume its services shortly.