Japan's Liquid Global Exchange Hacked; $90M in Crypto Siphoned Off

Japan's Liquid Global exchange said it has been hacked, and has suspended deposits and withdrawals.

• According to a tweet on Thursday, the exchange said its warm wallets were compromised and that it was moving digital assets offline.
• While the total amount stolen has yet to be determined, the value taken in bitcoin, ether, ripple, tron, and others could be upward of $90 million, Eddie Wang, senior researcher at OKLink, told CoinDesk.
• "We are currently investigating and will provide regular updates," the exchange said in the tweet. "In the meantime, deposits and withdrawals will be suspended."
• In a later tweet, Liquid Global said it's working with other exchanges to freeze the funds.
• Crypto exchange KuCoin's CEO, Johnny Lyu, said his platform was aware of the incident and had blacklisted the hacker's wallet addresses. Other exchanges are likely to follow suit.
• So far, it has revealed nine wallet addresses where the hacker is depositing heisted funds.
• One of the addresses Liquid Global revealed was still receiving bitcoin at 7:20 UTC
• In a blog post on the incident, translated from the Japanese by Google, Liquid Global claimed the hack targeted a multi-party computation (MPC) wallet. "This time, the MPC wallet (used for warehousing / delivery management of cryptographic assets) used by our Singapore subsidiary QUOINE PTE was damaged by hacking." the company said.
• MPC is an advanced cryptographic technique in which the private key controlling funds is generated collectively by a set of parties, none of whom can see the fragments calculated by the others. Liquid Global's blog post did not explain how this security arrangement was circumvented.
• Liquid Global is unrelated to the Liquid Network, the sidechain, or parallel system, to Bitcoin created by tech startup Blockstream.

UPDATE (AUG. 19, 7:59 UTC): Adds Liquid Global is working with other exchanges; updates number of destination addresses.

UPDATE (AUG. 19, 8:37 UTC): Updates value taken.

UPDATE (AUG. 19, 13:45 UTC): Addsdetail from Liquid Global's explanation of hack.